Star Wars Galaxies Team Letter

Sony’s official Star Wars Galaxies website has been updated with a new team letter, this time with audio designer Todd Davies discussing the fun and challenges he’s encountered creating sound for the original title and its upcoming Jump to Lightspeed expansion. A snip:

Early in the JTL development planning stages Cinco and I decided that each sound category that was recurring quickly would be quadruplicated and in a few cases have as much as 15 variations. How does it all work you ask? Well, this is how it all works. When a sound is requested by the game code it is selected from a list of possible SFX. The sound engine then decides what pitch, volume and 3D positional values to apply to the sound from a set of possible parameters based on your position in relation to the sound generating gear. Once the sound engine decides all this, the resulting sound effect data is then sent out to the speakers. While not new to gaming, this multi-source approach, combined with our existing sound engine tech provides many playback permutations and keeps the audio cyclical and fresh. In addition to the already excellent Galaxies sound engine, SOE audio programming guru Matt Bogue has further optimized SFX playback for “Jump to Lightspeed”. The new audio engine updates include a more advanced 3D positional prioritization and combining system. In other words you can hear more sounds and take up less CPU cycles in the process! YAY!