However, once you have good impulse responses, it sounds amazing, convincingly recreating even the complex acoustical environments, and requires little tweaking and tuning. Convolution reverb is heavy on the CPU, heavy on memory, and requires you to purchase, find, or record impulse responses, which can be costly or time-consuming. The resulting audio sample is applied to the sounds in the game using the convolution operation, making them appear to be playing within that room. An impulse response is created by playing a short sound, such as a spark or a starter pistol shot, and recording the acoustical response of the room. They also tend to be harder to set up to achieve satisfying results.Ĭonvolution reverb, on the other hand, uses a prerecorded impulse response of a real-life location. These effects use less CPU, but they tend to sound less natural and aesthetically pleasing than convolution reverb, especially for rooms with complex acoustics and longer reverberation time. Synthetic effects simulate reverberation algorithmically by using delay lines and filters such as comb and all-pass. The effect used may be synthetic reverb (such as Wwise RoomVerb) or convolution reverb. In this case, the entire hut is represented by one sound room highlighted in red.Ī reverb preset is a reverb effect with predefined settings that are fine-tuned to simulate acoustics of a specific room. In Hitman 2 they are defined using 3D shapes such as bounding boxes, cones, and convex polygonal shapes, as shown in Figure 1.įigure 1. Consequently, rooms roughly imitate physical structure of the level, representing both indoor and outdoor environments, and even parts of open terrain. A room in this context is a part of the game level with similar acoustic properties. This article refers to such areas as rooms, for consistency with Glacier and Wwise terminology, even though they do not necessarily represent enclosed spaces. Given the myriad of reflections that contribute to a reverberated sound, precise simulation of this phenomenon is very computationally expensive therefore, game developers must resort to various approximations.Ī popular approach is to spatially subdivide a game world into separate areas and assign a reverb preset to each area. In video games, reverb is an important immersion tool that gives players aural clues about environments where the action unfolds. These reflections amplify and color sound, and cause it to persist after the original, direct sound waves have faded. Reverb is the phenomenon that is created when the soundwaves are reflected off the surrounding surfaces. Many implementation details in this article will thus be specific to Wwise, but they can easily be adapted to any sound engine. The game is developed using the proprietary Glacier game engine and Audiokinetic Wwise* as the audio middleware. Hitman 2 is a live universe that keeps growing as new locations, missions, and content are added with regular updates. The game provides ample opportunities for any approach, as well as the ability to play with or against another person in Coop and Versus multiplayer modes. Whether to discreetly gain access to the target while disguised as another game character, orchestrate an accident, or complete the mission with guns blazing is entirely up to the player. Our players, assuming control of the iconic assassin Agent 47, explore large and vibrant levels, and find creative ways to flawlessly eliminate important and well-protected targets. Hitman 2, a stealth video game developed by Copenhagen-based IO Interactive and released in November 2018, is a continuation of the franchise that has attracted millions of fans around the world. More specifically, we talk about improving an important and computationally expensive area of game audio-the reverb. This paper, based on a joint effort by IO Interactive* and Intel, demonstrates how we used multicore CPUs and parallelization to make Hitman 2* sound more immersive.
Hitman 2 pc space code#
To take advantage of extra cores, developers need to aggressively parallelize code execution and make sure game features scale correctly on different CPUs. Popularization of CPUs with six and eight cores means that untapped processing power becomes available to games, and part of that power can be used to enhance our players’ audio experience.