Audio for Games: Planning, Process, and Production

Interactive Mixing and Dynamic Range

Currently the two major areas of interest in game audio are interactive mixing and dynamic range.

Interactive Mixing

Interactive mixing—that is, mixing game-audio content while the game is playing as part of the final stage of sound engineering—is a relatively new concept, but it's a process audio developers have wanted for a long time. Without interactive mixing, making a change to a sound's volume, for example, required changing code or text outside the game 99 percent of the time. This meant you had to tweak the sound separately and then test it within the game over and over until you got it right, a process that seemed interminable.

Now we have the means for audio folk to change any number of parameters ...