Dynamic music is one of my favorite little gem in videogames. The fact that the music can change seamlessly based on what’s going on screen keeps me amped-up! There’s mainly two major forms of dynamic music in videogames, adding layers to the track, or seamlessly changing from one track to the other. It seems Simcity will be using the former. Kent Jolly, audio director for Simcity shared some details on how the Glass Box engine will control the sounds you hear and the music that plays.
As you may already know, the Glass Box engine keeps track of every individual Sim in your city. This means that each Sim you see is actually going somewhere or actually doing something. The traffic simulation is advanced to the point where a traffic jam occurs in real time all because there’s a large amount of Sims heading into a particular direction.
The sound simulation works the same way, keeping track of every single car while playing sounds in real time. When a car starts to accelerate from a complete stop, you’ll hear a sound effect of it moving off right at that moment. When you hear a car whiz pass the screen, you’ll hear it in real time. The sounds will even match up when you change the game’s speed, (similarly to what The Sims currently does.)
Something new to the Simcity franchise is dynamic music! This time the composer is Chris Tilton, who is best known for his works on Fringe and Alcatraz. He’ll be particularly useful in using those creepy strained violin sounds, but I digress… After listening to an audio sample, the music for Simcity sounds eerily similar to The Sims 3.
Simcity will still have a list of different songs to play, however, each piece of music will be dynamically attuned based on what’s currently on the screen. For example, when zoomed out of your city, you’ll hear the entire music score. As you zoom in, parts of the track will be stripped away. When you enter edit mode or data view mode, you’ll hear an alteration of the track that reflects that mode.
The simulation picks from a list of tracks to play on the fly, and you will unlock more tracks as your city grows in population.
