Already feeling bogged down by April Fool's Day fluff? Why not settle in with a meaty feature on how Guitar Hero games are made, right down the excruciating details of audio programming.
It's the perfect counter-measure to a day's worth of stupid jokes and red herring news pieces, as it plunges straight past the fluff of the series and gets down into aspects rarely appreciated by the average gamer, and even more rarely acknowledged.
Tom Parker, an audio programmer from Guitar Hero developers Neversoft, is your tour guide, as he walks you through the nuts and bolts of the series, providing both technical details as well as screenshots showing how it all comes together. To give you a taste of how technical, here's an excerpt:
Once we have the tracks off the disc we need to be able to manipulate each track separately so we can have them respond to each player's actions. So, at run-time each stereo track is split apart from the interleaved FMOD Sound Bank (FSB) file and routed into a custom DSP network or "DSP Route" for further processing.
Sounds a bit much, but really, it's a great read, and proof that sound, the forgotten step-sister of graphics in gaming's multimedia family, can be just as interesting as anything visual a game can throw at you.
Bonus Feature: Backstage With The Audio Of Guitar Hero 5 [Gamasutra]