SimCity 3000 - Alex Zvenigorodsky

Interviewed : Alex Zvenigorodsky / Programmer / Maxis

                                    Interviewed by : Mark

                                    Date : December 12th 1998

3DSS: Hello Alex. Thanks for taking the time to do this interview. Perhaps you can start out by telling our readers a little about your background and your current role with Maxis.

Hello. My pleasure to talk with you.

I’ve been a programmer since I was in my early teens, starting with the Commodore 64 and Apple II. Back then I did it as a hobby, not realizing that there would be such an incredible need for programmers right now. I graduated from U.C. Berkeley two years ago with a B.A. in Computer Science and got a job at Maxis. I will have been here two years in February.

They put me to work on a team of four people in charge of the "Framework" for SimCity 3000. It’s the platform independent core technology (that runs on top of DirectX) and under the game itself. A part of the Framework is the sound system.

3DSS: Thanks! How long has Sim City 3000 been in development and when do you anticipate its release?

3K’s been in development for about 2 ½ years now. The best I can say about the release is that we’re planning on having it out this fall, in time for the Christmas shopping season.

3DSS: Getting right into the sound related questions. Are you using a sound track in SimCity? If yes, are you using a dynamic soundtrack or a more traditional redbook audio sound track and what were the reasons for your decision?

This is an interesting question as I spent quite a bit of time with our Audio Software Specialist Paul Wilkinson helping him develop his interactive music system he’s called "Freshness." I also wrote the tool to compose the musical scores. We initially had plans to use this for the music as well as the ambiences, but with all of the other sound work the composers had on their hands we decided to just stick with straight streaming audio. We still use Freshness for the ambiences though, and we’re planning on creating Freshness music scores in future updates of 3K.

3DSS: How does Freshness work?

Depending on the score, (i.e. Crime Score, Traffic Score, Water Score, Construction Score, etc.) there are two parameters that are looked at in the current view. The first one is the same for all scores: Intensity. (i.e. the more traffic on the screen, the more honking, engine sounds etc.) The second is dependant on the score: Sometimes it’s based on zoom, sometimes it’s based on other factors. The two factors determine what the set of cells Freshness can begin playing and when. Each cell in the score is composed of a sound sample, and about a dozen parameters. (Such as whether it can be positioned in 3D, Fade In and Out times, pitch bending, etc.)

There are about 2 to 5 scores playing at any one time while you play. All together anywhere between 5 and 15 samples are mixed together to create the city ambience. It really sounds fantastic.

3DSS: How long has positional audio been in the plans?

It was originally in the design when 3K was going to be fully in 3D. It made sense since the player moves around in 3D. When the decision was made to switch to 2D (to provide for higher detail than systems these days can handle) we had to think about whether to keep the 3D audio. The decision was eventually based on how we wanted to use the audio to give feedback in 3K.

3DSS: For the most part we have seen positional audio utilized in action games like Unreal and Jedi Knight. How do you see positional audio benefiting game play in Sim City?

In most games, audio is used as a supplement to animations or actions. In 3K, we use it for that, but we also use the ambiences to give the player feedback about what’s going on in the section of the city they’re looking at. You hear the ambiences all around you. So if you scroll over a high crime area, you’ll hear gun-shots, window break-ins, etc. In SimCity 2000 you had to open up a map view and look at the map to see where the high crime areas were. If you zoom back, you’ll hear increasing winds, maybe a distant ocean. The idea was to keep the player surrounded in sounds that reflect what’s going on, even if they can’t see it visually.

3DSS: What type of special audio effects will Sim City 3000 utilize?

Our sound system lets us use plenty of huge samples, so we don't have to use loops and built-in effects to save space. Most of the audio effects are rendered off-line. The only exception we're planning is Creative's EAX. EAX lets us change the sound to reflect the surroundings. For example, cars will sound different when driving between skyscrapers.

3DSS: How did you generate the sound effects for Sim City 3000?

Kent Jolly and Robi Kauker were responsible for this. Robi’s answer is "Very Carefully." J

Sound effects were taken from many sources. Kent hung a microphone outside of his apartment in Oakland for some samples; Robi went into some of our existing libraries. All of the sounds were carefully touched up in our Sound Studio.

3DSS: Here’s a question from left field. J What is the maximum number of channels of 3D audio that SimCity 3000 might throw at a sound card?

Actually that’s a good question. All of our sounds are decompressed on the fly from disk or CD. Luckily our decompression routines are fast enough to play up to 15 compressed sounds at once, with minimal CPU hit.

Typically we have between 5 and 10 sounds playing at any one time. (All but one of which is in 3D.) The user has the option of turning off 3D positioning if he/she doesn’t have 3D Sound hardware to take the load off the CPU.

3DSS: What is it that SimCity 3000 will offer gamers to distinguish itself from all of the anticipated hot releases scheduled for the next several months?

Good question. Considering the quantity of titles coming out, it’s becoming more and more difficult to stand out. Two things make a title stand out more than any other:

1)Game play. (We’ve started with a winning formula in SimCity 2000 and extended it, so we we’re sure the game would be fun right from the start.)

2)Production value. We’ve put maybe 30+ man years of work into SimCity 3000. It’s simply impossible to match the quantity and quality of graphics, animations, sounds, music, and complexity in 3K.

If you’ve noticed, no one else has really made a city simulation based game except for Maxis. Part of it is sheer complexity of the simulation, and part of it is that to surpass today’s top quality titles, you need a large number of extremely talented artists working for over a year. We’ve had three composers, Jerry Martin, Robi Kauker, and Kent Jolly working for almost a year creating music, and recording sound effects (we have over 650 separate sound effects in the game.) And two programmers, Paul Wilkinson (who created Freshness) and myself.

But in the end all that matters is how fun it is to play, how good it looks, and how good it sounds.

3DSS: Can you tell us anything about your plans beyond Sim City 3000 and more specifically is continued support for 3d sound in those plans?

Well a SimCity 4000 is almost a sure thing. But before that there will be upgrades for 3000 for the next year or two to improve on the already great game. Beside that, Maxis has plans for other titles that will make more use of the sound.

3DSS: Thanks Alex for taking the time to answer these question from us. We look forward to trying out Sim City in the near future.

References:

http://www.Maxis.com
http://www.simcity3000.com

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