VORPAL - A middleware for real-time soundtracks in digital games

Author: Wilson Kazuo Mizutani

Advisor: Fabio Kon

Real-time soundtrack middleware project for digital games.

Motivation

n the digital games’ context, there is a lot of interest in exploring the nonlinearity of the media through soundtracks built and/or manipulated in real-time. However, many challenges of technical and practical order may compromise the productivity and escalability of this approach. In particular, composers and sound designers depend on programmers to insert dynamic audio controls into the game’s code. This work seeks to develop a middleware that eases this authoral intervention from musicians, allowing them to define the soundtracks behaviour using a dedicated interface, and then forwarding the produced content to be processed by the game application.

Progress

During the first semester of 2015, we performed an initial bibliographic exploration. We also interviewed a composer and a sound designer with game audio experience. During June and July, we wrote the text for the qualifying exam required at our Institute. The exam ocurred in August 17, 2015. It was written and presented in portuguese, but the final dissetation is being written in English. At the same time, we started implementing the middleware with contributions by Lucas Dario, a Conputer Science graduation student, as part of his graduating monograph.

Following suggestions from the exam’s committee suggestions, we searched for a more explicit formulation of the work’s objective and proposal requirements. For that, we scheduled more interviews with game audio professionals and revisited the bibliography. From three contacted musicians, only two could help. The system requirements text is available neste documento.

Regarding the implementation, we were successful in integrating real-time audio processing from PureData with access to the computer’s sound card through the OpenAL library. We have working examples as text-only programs, a bullet hell minigame and an adaptation from Mari0. Afther this, having these main features done, we shall focus our efforts into the improvement of the tool’s interface (both for musicians and for programmers) while we continue to write the dissertation.

Project information

Source code available at: github.com/vorpal-project Main programming language: C++ Tools used: OpenAL, PureData, libpd Games developed as prototypes for the middleware

Thesis

Executed on: 24/01/2017

Committee members:

Publications

Realizada dia: 24/01/2017 Membros da banca:

  • Prof. Dr. Fabio Kon (presidente) - IME-USP
  • Prof. Dr. Ricardo Nakamura - EPUSP
  • Prof. Dr. Jônatas Manzolli - UNICAMP Texto final revisado

Publications

  • MIZUTANI, W. K.; KON, F. An extensible and flexible middleware for real-time soundtracks in digital games. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium on CMMR, pages 175–182. The Laboratory of Mechanics and Acoustics, 2016 - PDF.
  • MIZUTANI, W. K.; DE LUCCA, D. V.; KON, F. Sound wanderer: An experimental game exploring real-time soundtrack. Demonstration at the 12th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research, 2016, São Paulo, 2016 -PDF / Vídeo.