In the case of the audio engine, we wanted to do so much more in Guild Wars 2 that we felt it was worth the time to rethink our entire approach, both from a creative and from a technical standpoint. We started over with a completely blank slate and spent a significant amount of time creating a brand new audio system built on top of the core FMOD audio engine, along with a new set of tools to manage the vast quantities of resources that would be inevitably generated. Using lessons learned from our previous games, we created this new system with a lot of input from our audio team, so it’s designed for the challenges a massive game like Guild Wars 2 brings.
Audio Workshop is the new tool the audio team uses to integrate and control sounds in a way our game engine understands. From there, they can create sound scripts and attach them to any model in the game, or position them in a region of the world as ambience. Any animation or event can trigger any sound or script handler, and these handlers can incorporate any of the dozens of properties available to any character in the game world. Additionally, the audio team has a large amount of control over the overall game mix. We designate a number of mixing “snapshots,” and the audio team can tweak a mixing panel to determine how various audio categories are adjusted at any point in time. For instance, when the player is in a downed state, the world will sound very different than when you’re up and fighting in combat.
We’re creating a gigantic world, and we want it to be filled with the sounds you’d expect in a living, breathing environment. The sheer quantity of sounds required is staggering. Every single critter in the game, from chickens running around underfoot to a huge creaking Oakheart trudging through the snow will have a complete and unique set of sounds. When a warrior in full plate mail runs by, he will sound very different than an elementalist in her cloth armor. In Guild Wars 2, much of the natural ambience of the world actually comes from the creatures, characters, and players all around you. You’ll hear frogs croaking as you approach the edge of a river, but perhaps only in the early evening hours. The world ambience shifts and changes over the course of the day instead of simply playing repetitive loops.
For the player, this just means that they’ll hear a much richer, more vibrant sounding world that not only changes visually from minute to minute, but aurally as well. This is partly because our sound engine is able to squeeze more out of our existing assets than was previously possible, but it’s mostly because of the incredible care and attention to detail that our audio team lavishes on even the smallest creature or prop in the game. And because the audio engine is completely multi-threaded, we can take advantage of the multiple cores you find on most of today’s computers without sacrificing overall performance of the game.
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Originally Posted by ComplexNuber
