I will never purchase or recommend one of their products again due to this posting.
What a complete load of crap. You can ask anyone who knows Greg personally that this is pretty far from the truth, at least with his time at SOE.
I actually emailed blue sky about this atrocity and highlighted my particular gripes. While they didn’t respond to me nor did they fix a majority of the issues they did silently make one edit. But since I received no direct response from them I am going to repost the original verbage.
What led to the decision to open your own shop?
When I was at Sony online, I had the opportunity to work with a lot of contractors, and I was testing out the notion of whether people can work remotely. The interesting thing about the game industry is that it’s becoming more like the film industry, and it is getting to the point where you’re starting to see a lack of creative staff at all the game studios. What this means is that the demand for outsourcing for game audio is going to go way up, and I wanted to take advantage of that.
“lack of creative staff at all the game studios“… yes, that was the original quote.
So, I ask the rest of you creatively lacking audio designers out there to not support a company who would so openly state such a complete and untrue criticism of your career. Greg may have thought that the people he worked with were talentless but he took it to a new level bashing the entire game audio industry and blue sky endorsed is as far as I’m concened by posting this.
So I’ve been using ProTools for more than a decade at this point and never once have I done this… But they were sitting there and I had a bit of down time so I “beautified” my keyboard! I was always hesitant to do it before because when I saw others they always looked like ass, but with a girls touch it looks pretty good, heh.
I’ve been messing with Ableton Live Lite this week. Expanding my horizons I guess. I don’t write music but I’ve found some other uses for it and since it was free with ProTools I might as well take advantage of if. Pretty fun. I need another Accel card… Ok well I WANT another Accel card… need might be a debatable term. I got and HD2 system here. I need to open up this computer and even see if I have other slots available. Those damn SoundToys plugins take up a full chip each! And TL Space takes up several each it seems. Right now I have 2 loaded for surround and it says 7.
I am really liking ProTools 8… tho one annoying glitch I am personally experiencing is it resetting my fucking preferences. Not storing windows, default fade types, etc… Not sure what this is about. Been to lazy to go over to the DUC.
My L C R Ls RS Lfe > L R C Lfe Ls Rs has been solved by my glorious coders the other day. I love when problems get remedied in short time spans! Jealous of my coders? You should be! They’re the best!
I’ve attempted the skirt thing or general dressing “girly” to work. It just can’t be done. I am constantly on the floor or crawling under my desk to change out a cable, grab the iLok, adjust my damn keyboard tray, etc. Even in the recording studio to get the 2″ tapes out of storage required squirming on hands and knees thru a little cubbyhole to get into the tape room.
And after it all I normally look like a dustbunny with rugburns.
Never in my life have I worked for a game company where so many artists, designers, and coders get here early. You are disrupting my noisy time!!!! The early hours are when I like to make the most noise since no one is supposed to be here. I’m not like the other sound designers who get their best work done at 11pm. Argh!
Soon hopefully I’ll have a nice floated sound room where I can be as noisy as I want and not disturb people… And additionaly I won’t have to hear about what shitty reality tv they watched last night thru my subpar closed door…
Damn people, sleep in! You make games for a living!
Been working on some multichannel ambiences the past few days. Was evaluating which convolution plug-in I wanted to get work to order for me.
Altiverb XL has too many differences between Mac and PC
Waves IR360 worked fine but seemed kinda a resource hog
TL Space was my favorite and also the cheapest of the 3. Seemed to be less of a system hog. I’ve been using the stereo version of this plug-in for a long while on my personal system so I think this is the best choice for me.
I do get frustrated with the multiple “standards” of channel setups. L C R Ls Rs LFE, L R C LFE Ls Rs, etc. So making sure everything matched up within ProTools seems to be quite a process at times since everything defaults to a different “standard”. The most recent fun with with Absynth. Its channel setup was different and for some reason when I switched it in the plug-in verion it wasn’t saving so obviously the channels were mapped incorrect to the actual ProTools outputs. Eventually after about 30 minutes of fiddling it finally saved the freaking settings. Unfortunately I bet this wont’ carry over to new sessions I start… Hopefully it won’t be such a pain to setup again in the future tho… Oh Native Instruments… you are getting so buggy.
I hate my MacBook Pro. I’m in the process of trying to sell it. I basically just want to make back around $1500 so I can get a native Windows system. I tried OSX, I don’t like it, and Boot Camp for XP has issues…
In case I fail at unloading the CrapBook I have installed Vista on it. It seems to be working better than XP tho I am not a fan of the idea of being forced into upgrading my OS. Especially since Vista is going to be replaced by 7 in no time. I was fortunate enough tho to have a Vista upgrade disk so no harm really I guess. It’s the Home Premium version tho which ProTools does not “support” but they do say there are no known issues with it. So I’m downloading 8 (again) and we shall see…
I like how small this laptop is but I kinda miss my right mouse button for when i don’t have a real mouse attached. I can get a nice Dell for around $1800 which should work smoothly… Someone offered my $850 for this MacBook Pro… um, no.
Computers are a pain in the ass. And the XP issue is just SO stupid. It won’t hold a wireless connection. Constantly drops out. No upgraded drivers for it. I was unable to find any other drivers that would work as well. Lame problem to want to to rid of a laptop for… but really… how portable is this thing if you can’t get a decently stable connection…
I wanted to record some footsteps this weekend… I slacked. Well not really slacked, I spent a lot of time getting my external drives reformatted back to NTFS.
Gonna try something different with footsteps this time around, should be interesting to see how it turns out. I like to record my own stuff when possible but I was using library stuff just to get some rough material to see if my footstep method would work. It’s amazing how poor some of the samples in these (not cheap) libraries are. NOISY! I mean very noisy. Seems inexcusable to be really. I would not let those sounds get used in a game or other product. I mean lion samples or such that have some nature sounds in the background is a bit more understandable… but footsteps? Should be no problem recording those in a controlled environment. And if you are going to be selling those sounds you should have decent gear to capture said source. So I really don’t understand the crappy quality. Frustrating…
I need some new mics. I don’t have very many… In fact I only have 4. I would like to get a PZM for sure. I want to record some vehicle sounds and I think that would work well for the way I want to try and capture it. Not to mention they can kind of take a beating and be taped down which is a plus.
Next weekend I swear I will record those footsteps and rearrange my studio to face the other direction in my loft.
I want to purchase the Complete Production Toolkit for my home LE system. It’s $2000.
I need to record some interesting stuff this weekend. Trying to figure out how to approach it. Actually it’s not that interesting but it’s for a new iPhone app. iPhone apps buy Complete Production Toolkit perhaps!!!!
Wow, I’m bored tonight! Even more pathetically my main computer is upstairs but the couch is winning the tug-of-war!
This is my favorite aspect of game audio from start to finish. I love designing the systems and then collaborating with programmers to see how we can get it all to work. Stepping it up every game or expansion adding new levels of realism. I believe this is especially important for MMO games. Environments need to be made interesting since players can be in them for years…
When I started out on EverQuest 2 my focus was mainly creatures. I enjoy making creatures as well but when I was given a chance for a zone I just fell in love with ambient audio. I had mostly only worked on sports genres prior to SOE so lots of crowd sounds and general indoor environments. Nothing as in-depth as an outdoor area tho.
The opportunities to make living, breathing worlds are limitless. I can bang out something acceptable for a game in a few hours but I can spend weeks tweaking it.
Once the tools are usable and I can start creating assets is when the real fun begins. Whether the area is meant to mimic the real world or it’s completely fictional, I have the responsibility to make it believable. It’s more than just birds in the day and crickets at night, it should be an adaptive experience that’s constantly changing. It shouldn’t just play as background noise… I got to start implementing some of these systems into EverQuest 2 before I left SOE. I am looking forward to expanding upon them in up-coming games.
I nearly always have one of my portable recorders with me incase there is something cool to capture. I’m not purist I guess, I feel I can totally get uasble source from a Microtrack or a Zoom H2. I know several people bash the more “consumer” recorders and while I do have a more “pro” (and bulky) field recording setup, it’s not practicle for just being out and about.
Anyways, here are a few screens of some of my favorite zones I have worked on.
Angry & 
Annoyed
Esctatic
I need another Accel card… Ok well I WANT another Accel card… need might be a debatable term. I got and HD2 system here. I need to open up this computer and even see if I have other slots available. Those damn SoundToys plugins take up a full chip each! And TL Space takes up several each it seems. Right now I have 2 loaded for surround and it says 7.
Jealous of my coders? You should be! They’re the best! 
Surprised
Happy
Bored & 
Confused
Tired
Playful
