Lars Hammer

Thanks everyone for the welcome. I will try to answer all of your questions... Thanks gogo for pinning this thread! I'm not sure if I understood you correctly - there is a specific sound for each spell and there will be a variation in time - some spells will be cast faster at a higher level. But it is not as sophisticated as the weapon sound system. Yes, there will be a lot of nature sounds in the game, depending on the region and on the time of day. We have four different "timezones" per region - daytime, "highnoon" (time betwenn 10am and 2pm), nighttime and of course the dungeons. All sets are different - for instance, in the highelven region, most of the birds are active in the morning and in the evening hours. At highnoon you will hear more bees, bumblebees and sounds like that. In the night you'll hear a completely different soundset - owls, howling wolves far away, cracking branches, wind and so on. We put a lot of detail in the atmospheric sound for each region to make it believable for the player. The rain/thunder/storm is a different thing... there will be a mix of three different rain layers - easy, medium and hard. The layers will be faded accordingly to the current strength of the rain. With stronger rain there will be storm sounds added. Birds are still active in "light" rain, but will be muted when the rain gets stronger. Actually I watched rain and thunderstorm in the real world before I started programming the weather sound effects to make it sound realistic. What do you mean by "different parts"? Soundeffects are done by different ways - we use special sound effect libraries and we record new samples. Its usually a mix of both ways. Some samples are created by artificial synthesis programs and some are recorded the old-fhasioned way: hit with a sword in front of a microphone. Just one song - "Sacred". There is an instrumental version of the song in the game and of course the full version with voices. Kind regards, Lars

The demo next week will be in German only. But of course there will be an English demo released too to a later time (publisher/marketing decision, not developer). Regards, Lars

Hi everyone, thanks for the welcome. First of all I'd like to explain what exactly it is what I'm doing in the Sacred 2 team. I did not compose any of the music (OK, only one little track) or create soundeffects... we're doing this as a team. The project is way too big for one person to do all this alone. I'm a programmer with musical training/background and I also did a few game soundtracks in the past. For Sacred2 I wrote the audio concept, designed the sound engine, programmed it. The music was composed to my proposals and concepts by the award-winning team of Dynamedion, a group of 4 composers and sound designers. The soundeffects are created by two of my colleagues at the Ascaron sound department. And I'm the one who supervises all audio content, checks and approves it, convert it und put it into the game. So actually the sound team is at least a group of 7 people and a few more guys (XBox/PS3 team, external composers) working on this. Now to Gogo's questions... Actually, my taste in music has changed over the years. When I was starting to listen to game and movie soundtracks I was a huge fan of Orchestral soundtracks - Star Wars, John Williams and so on. Over the years my taste has changed to more subtle, minimalistic style of music. So its no wonder that I would call my favourite game soundtracks the Fallout/Fallout2 and Baldurs Gate/Baldurs Gate 2 game music. And of course I love the games and music of the old Origin games... Ultima, Wing Commander, Martian Dreams and so on. I'm listening to the music still today. Has anything influenced the work on Sacred 2? Yes of course... if you listen to some of the desert/canyon tracks, there a hint of post-apocalyptic music in it... There is one special sound in the old Bullfrog game "Syndicate", that haunts me over the years... I still have it in my ears. From time to time I did hear it again in other games (hmm... how does that happen? ), but it will always remind me of "Syndicate". I dont remember whre it was used in the game, it was a trademark sound. Most of the time I have a sound already in my head when I see a graphical FX. Usually I discuss this with my colleagues and they create it. But sometimes they surprise me with something that works even better. Most difficult sound in Sacred 2... hmmm... I guess the T-Energy trademark sound was hard to find. We worked weeks on it. Everything in Ancaria that works with T-Energy does have a bit of it in it, so it had to be a non-annoying, but still recognizable sound. Like I already mentioned, I have a technical and a musical background. Sacred 2 is my ... <counting>... 8th big AAA-title I am doing programming stuff and the ... <counting again> fourth AAA-title I'm doing some sound/music for. Yes, having big variations in any repeating sounds like hits, footsteps etc. is a must. We do have at least 4 to 8 different hit sounds per weapon and material. Often-used weapons even have more. For a standard sword we have 48 different sounds in Sacred2 - 12 for "hit-on-bare flesh", 12 for "hit-on-leather", 12 for "hit-on-chain" and finally 12 sounds for "hit-on-plate metal". And there are still a few tricks like pitch variation and realtime mixing with what we call "pre-hit" sounds that will make it sound interesting and realistic. Actually I do hate it too when I play other games and I can hear that they are using exactly _two_ footstep sounds - one for left, one for right... always the same "tip-tap-tip-tap" No, not a specific one. I'm happy if you would stop in the game from time and just listen and enjoying the sound of Ancaria around you while playing Sacred2. Especially at nights it is a pleasure to walk through Ancaria (if there are no monsters nearby of course ) In an earlier project I was working on, some people wrote me that they sometimes started the game and go with their char into the woods and let their player char just stand around to enjoy the sounds and music - thats the best compliment one can get... The music in Sacred2 has a lot of taks to fullfill... there are the region music tracks - they have to be mellow and relaxing and still bringing you into the mood of the region where you are in. This is to relax you after a fight. Then there are the fight themes. Every char has its own sets of fight music, its always just a short, dramatic, uptempo loop (most fights in Sacred are not that long). But the kind of fight music tells you about the strength and danger of your enemies - the "heavy" theme is way more guitar-driven, the "light" theme just warns you about the fight. And sometimes there is no music, just a dangerous warning noise that tells you that there is something coming up... some boss monsters do have their own fight theme. And there are some special locations with their own music... you have to find out about this yourself... I think you'll be surprised... Did I mentioned that all tracks are mixed in real 5.1? After all Sacred 2 is the biggest project I ever worked on. The sound assets are huge... over 100 different music tracks, over 11.000 soundeffects samples and 27.000 speech samples per language. I hope you'll like it! And now for that beer.... cheers! Lars

Hi, a few days ago Gogo invited me here to DarkMatters (where is my free drink? ) and so I created an account here. So I wanted to say HELLO to everyone... Just in case you dont know me from the official Sacred 2 forums... I'm working at Studio II in Aachen/Germany and I am responsible for sound & music in Sacred 2. So please feel free to ask any questions about these topics and I will try to answer it (as far as my timetable and NDA allows me to). Kind regards, Lars