Fall 2011 meetings

5 Oct

Thursdays, 7:00pm in Studio D1 of the Steinhardt Education building 8th floor.

 

No meeting on October 13th.

NGAMA Game Audio Jam (NGAMAGAJ?)

27 Apr

This Saturday, April 30th 2011, NGAMA will be hosting a Game Audio Jam on the 7th floor of Kimmel Center (Google Maps).

What is a Game Audio Jam? Read on to find out!

Continue reading →

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Tutorial: Minecraft Sound Modding

9 Mar

Replacing the sounds or music in Minecraft is relatively simple. First you should navigate to the folder where Minecraft stores its sound files.

MAC:

/Users/~Library/Application Support/minecraft/resources

Windows:

C:\Users\[insertuser]\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\resources

The majority of the sound files are in the folder “newsound” and the music files in “newmusic” All the audio is (as far as I know) 16 bit 44.1kHz .ogg files. Predictably, the music files are in stereo and all the sfx are in mono. To swap these sounds we basically will just be overwriting them. I would recommend starting by backing up all the files you will be overwriting.

Create a folder that will contain your soundbanks. It doesn’t really matter where you put it. Take the first sound that you want to replace and reproduce its folder tree into your soundbank folder (example: copy resources/newsound/liquid). Export your replacement sound to this folder as an .ogg at 16 bit 44.1k and give it the same name as the original sound. Repeat this process for every sound you want to replace. When you are ready, just merge your soundbank with the resources directory. If it worked correctly it will ask you if you want to overwrite some files.

Now, to prevent Minecraft from overwriting these files every time you restart the game, you need to download and install epinull’s Sound Mod Enabler or crazyputje’s Sound Mod Enabler depending on which one is up to date with Minecraft.

Be aware that every official update to Minecraft completely breaks the sound mod so you either have to stick with the default sounds until a new version of the sound mod is released, or copy files into the resources directory after the game is already running (this requires you to do it every time you start up the game).

Good luck, and let me know if you run into any problems.

fmod, events, and other stuff

2 Mar

hey guys. mike will probaby be sending an email about this later, but this week we’re basically going to be trying to teach ourselves how to use fmod. we’ll be looking at tutorials and videos, and experimenting with the program until we can get something cool to happen. we probably won’t get incredibly far without mike helping us out, but if we can at least get some experience with the audition tool and setting cues, it should definitely be helpful. of course, if there are any projects anyone feels like showing off or talking about, we’ll do that too.

download links:
fmod (make sure you download fmod designer)
unity (we probably won’t be looking at this this week)

news:

* the march meet n’ drink for nycgi (nyc game industry) will be on thursday, march 17 (from 7 pm until “whenever the bar closes!”) at barcade (388 union ave, brooklyn, ny 11211). as always, it should be a great chance to have fun and socialize with people in the industry. info here: http://www.nycgameindustry.com/nycgi-meet-n-drink-march-201/

game center stuff:

• the game center is currently hosting its first film series, geared towards films that examine various aspects of gaming culture. on march 10 (next thursday), it will be showing “beyond the game”, a documentary that “looks at the culture of high level, high stakes warcraft iii.” the event may include a q&a from the filmmakers, but as of right now that isn’t certain. you can find more info about the series here: http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/?p=1358 i’ll be sending reminder emails as new films are being showed.

• from nyugamecenter’s twitter feed: “If you’ve designed a fighting game, iSpy Productions is looking for in-game footage for a film. For details, contact: gamecenter@nyu.edu”

• this is pretty early, but the game center has also announced its 2nd annual “no quarter exhibition”, which will feature games commissioned from terry cavanagh, ramiro corbetta, and charley miller. the games will be debuted on may 12. of course, i’ll be sending more emails about this later. the announcement is here: http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/?p=1436

– david

Python: Part 2

18 Nov

This week we’ll be having another Python lesson. The intention of this was to give everyone a solid overview of programming concepts that we can apply later to projects.

If you missed last week, or are a total newbie at programming, don’t worry–this is for you! The lesson will start with an overview of the concepts learned from last time, and then build from there. This will cover the fundamental knowledge you’ll need to know for programming, and also have a chance to play back some audio within Python, which should be pretty cool. There are always more things to learn, but you will leave the studio with a solid grasp of how to program a computer.

So for this week, I need anybody planning on attending to make sure you have Python 2.6.6 currently installed, and also install PyGame 1.9.1 for Python 2.6:

‘Nuff said. We won’t be meeting next week of course, but expect something grand the Friday after. Also, this week there will be pizza.

The UberMeeting

11 Nov

Tomorrow we’ll be having a big ole meeting. Covering the following:

  1. Budgeting plans
  2. NYU Alum talking about experience in AAA game industry (tentative)
  3. The Fundamentals of Programming

In order to prepare for the programming segment be sure to download and install Python 2.6.6 with all the default options. We need this version so when we start using a library for graphics and sound, we’ll all have the same set of features available to us. And of course, remember to bring your laptop. If your laptop is busted, let me know, we can use the desktop in there. And if enough people don’t have laptops, we’ll find a computer lab to reserve next time, or something like that.

Download Python 2.6 for Windows

Download Python 2.6 for Mac

Rock Band Network Workshops

30 Oct

Looks like Pyramind, a major game audio production house in San Francisco is hosting free workshops on Rock Band Network. There are two dates for New York City: Wednesday Nov. 10th, and Thursday No. 11th. You have to register quick, otherwise the space will fill up.

 

More info Here:

http://www.pyramind.com/rockband/register.html

Todo: This Friday

28 Oct

Last week, Stephen Harwood came back and talked a little bit more about game audio, and even gave a demo of FMOD (the sexier, shinier version than I showed you), and even took a student’s work and rigged up a little adaptive music sequence with it on the fly.

For more info on FMOD and to download the designer tool, go to http://www.fmod.org/ and download “FMOD Designer 2010”.

For our meeting in Studio D1, we watched some videos of gameplay and talked a little bit about them and what opportunities there are for adding music or sound effects to them. Below I’ve added the list of videos we looked at, so pick on that interests you the most, and start making some audio assets for it. Don’t worry about having a big beautiful production-ready soundtrack to go, we’ll give each other some feedback this week and present the final products next Friday.

These can be sound effects, original music, or music from a band or songwriter that you think would fit well. Then, put the video in a video editor and arrange all the audio clips to make your own soundtrack. Export your work, and we’ll all look at it in class next week. There’s no pressure for it to be complete, it’s just a way for us to check up and make sure everyone’s comfortable with the process and offer some critique.

For sound effects resources, check out http://www.soundsnap.com/. They sell individual sound effects for pretty cheap. Also, on the 8th floor of 35 W. 4th, all the iTunes libraries of the computers are full of sound effects. Just search the library and you’re bound to find something interesting to use.

For video editing software, check out this article for some recommendations. For info on producing music tracks, here’s another article with a list of good music production software.

The links below are the videos we looked at. You need a gametrailers.com account to download them. I created  Here are the links to the videos:

If you have any questions, feel free to email us, or comment on the site. This email will be duplicated as an article. Remember, just make some music, edit some sound effects, and we’ll reconvene to critique each other’s work this upcoming Friday, October 29th at 12:00pm in Studio D1.

Music Production Software

24 Oct

There are lots of free alternatives to professional digital audio workstations available nowadays. Here’s a list per-platform.

Continue reading →

Video Editing Software

24 Oct

For our next project, we’re going to make some music and sound effects and add them to videos of games. If you’ve never edited video before, here’s a list of zero-cost software packages to choose from, organized by platform. Continue reading →

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