Crowd – Making the sound for the crowd that supports up to 1200 characters on screen at once.
Sound experience: The crowd system
For the crowd system we are relying on two key features in our engine Glacier 2. The template and blend features.
Our crowd system supports up to 1200 characters and that requires a unique sound approach and setup in order to create an overall authentic and believable crowd, ready to interact and adapt to all movements and behaviour patterns that you as the gamer choose to carry out.
The sound system supports blend sounds which opens up for a dynamic and runtime based interactive mixing of sound assets. Here we can pitch, attenuate, change, EQ, etc. single sound assets based upon the unique crowd ratio numbers. And each parameter can independently be affected by the subset of conditions or crowd information numbers. These pieces of information are the cornerstones in setting up the crowd soundscape.
Our vocal sounds differ between intelligible and unintelligible assets as a part of the overall sound experience and make it possible to create the illusion of crowd scaling from 1200 to a few characters when you as a gamer blend in and out, in the hope that your movements will pass by unnoticed.
Using the conditions originated from the crowd, we are able to be very precise about the current state of the crowd and, based on that analysis, play the context relevant assets.
