Call of Duty: Ghosts executive producer at Infinity Ward, Mark Rubin talked about the difference between current and next gen versions of the game, especially when it came to bringing some of the new “next gen” features to the Xbox 360, for instance.
“Basically what we do is for a weapon sound you used to have an interior sound and an exterior sound. If I’m inside play the inside sound, if I’m outside play the outside sound, that’s how simple it was. What we did for Xbox One is, we created a full Attack-Decay-Sustain-Release reverb system that models the geometry in real time to determine what the sound will sound like.
“And it takes into effect the materials, not just the volume. So if I’m in a room and it’s a metal room, it’s going to sound ‘tingy’. I’m going to have a ‘tingy’ sound. If I’m in a stone room, it’s going to sound muted and sharp, and the tail will get cut off. And if I go outside, you’ll have a longer tail,” he said in a conversation with OXM,
On audio designers often being left out in the cold when it comes to implementing the things they want, Rubin remarked. “It is a challenge, and it’s funny because the audio guys are always complaining that they’re always left out of the new features in every game! That’s totally true, and we’re guilty of it.”
But “with this game we actually put a lot of effort into audio in general – the ADSR reverb, the reactive emitters, which basically populate the entire volume with reactive sounds. It’s not just the sound of rubble falling. If I throw a grenade over here and there’s a chainlink fence behind me, I’ll hear the chainlink fence rattle as I’d expect it to in real life, so you’ll hear things shake and move from things that are happening on the map.”
Which is tougher to do on the Xbox 360 given the relatively lower RAM, but the developer managed to make it happen. “The cool thing though is that system we put on Xbox One and then looked at 360 and said can we do this? And the guys went ‘oh, this is going to be tough,’ and for a while I wasn’t sure if it was going to make it, but we ended up getting it onto 360 so the 360 has all that new tech in audio, which is really exciting.”
Call of Duty: Ghosts releases on November 5th worldwide for Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3,PS4, PC and Wii U.