Weapon Sounds​

Blog Post 3

Video  1

Video 2

Gaming Weapon Sounds

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Based on the videos, the weapon sounds that I created were for the shock rifle gun (purple in color). Sounds were also created for the picking up of ammo, the picking up of a weapon, the traveling of the shock rifle fire over a long distance and the raising and lowering of the shock rifle.

 

The initial laser sound of the shock rifle was first created using the synthesizer ES P in Logic Pro 9. I then edited the settings to change the sound a bit so it could be layered. Once I was satisfied, I recorded a few takes of the laser sounds onto an audio track. When the initial sound was done, I used sounds such as lightening strikes and thunder bursts to layer with the laser sound and I pitched shifted them to get different versions of the same type of sound. I felt like the gun looked like a laser and when fired the shot from the gun seemed like electricity or lightening so that gave me the idea to create the sounds for it in this manner.

Further processing was done such as changing around speed, tempo and experimenting with reverse effects and reverbs and delays. I also layered in real gun shot sounds from the sound library in Logic Pro 9 and processed these sounds with pitch shifting, speed, tempo and delay effects as well.

The sounds created for the picking up of ammo, the picking up of a weapon and the raising and lowering of the shock rifle were also created in the same manner as the shock rifle sounds. Some of the same sounds as the shock rifle were used and simply pitch shifted or edited with other effects to alter them so they didn't sound exactly alike. The traveling sound of the shock rifle fire was a mixture of low thunder rumbling that was pitch shifted and edited in tempo and speed. It was also supposed to be a looping sound.

Once all of the sounds were completed, they were bounced as 16bit 32k .WAV mono files and imported into the UDK (Unreal Development Kit) game editor. These sounds were imported into packages into the content browser of the UDK game editor and were called SoundNodeWave files. To implement these weapon sounds into the game, the Sound Waves had to be placed into SoundCues within Kismet in order to be triggered in the game. Kismet in the UDK editor allows you to create different events that are used to trigger and perform actions within the game.

Once a SoundCue is set up with the right Sound Wave, you can add certain functions to the sound like modulation, attenuation, delay etc. Then, you can make a 'PlaySound' event in kismet that will trigger the SoundCue to play. It goes a bit more in depth than that, but that's the basic gist of how the sounds are brought into the game. Of course there is a bit more back-end coding to get everything working as it should. There are also objects called 'actors' and 'triggers' that you visually place on the map in the game and then, you can add functionality to them using Kismet.