audio replacement? Thread

hello all,

i'm a sound designer and composer for video games, so far i only worked on small projects, mostly 2d games, and i want to try something a little bit more difficult(3d games), so i would like to know what would be the best game to replace sounds for, i'm a beginner in modding, and my goal is to design and replace sounds (probably music also) for a game, just for studying purposes (well at least for now)...should i instantly grab something like udk and learn it, or go easy on first time?

p.s.: sorry for my not so good english, i'm not from english speaking country

How is sound design for 3D any more difficult than sound design for 2D? IMO it's not a question of 2D vs 3D rather a question of style and genre of the game.

If you want to just replace sounds and your intention is audio design you can do it simply by swapping the audio files of a game of your choice as they usually aren't packed deep in the game libraries if packed at all. No need for game development tools such as UDK.

But rather than doing that I actually recommend joining a mod / indie game project that needs a sound artist. That is a better way to improve in video game sound engineering and composing and you are also helping others as a bonus.

its not that its more difficult, but you can do more interesting stuff in 3d(we don't even use positional audio in our 2d engine, nor any kind of effects...reverberation, etc), that's why i want to go a more advanced way.

also i don't think that to do indie project at this stage is really good for me, i need a little bit of training and knowledge about audio in 3d games (i'm bored of 2d projects hehe ).

AFAIK Surround sound system is done with coding ie. calculating volume adjustment based on sound origin and player location for left and right "ears" or "listeners" and applying the effect to 2.1/5.1/whatever channels' output volumes of the audio file being played. If these effects are what you want to learn then I believe it's audio coding but I also think UDK / Unity3D / any advanced 3D game platform ships with the code package for basic stuff like positional audio and reverb so people don't have to make it themselves for each game.

If you're not a coder and already know how to compose suitable music and create audio effects I'm not sure there is much to learn. But hopefully someone makes sense of it and is able to point you in the right direction.

Edited by: shadowflar3

well i checked unity engine, and i will probably will go for it, i noticed that you can build simple worlds/objects and make a character, that can interact with them just with basic stuff, i think that's a good way to start, thanks