If someone had said I would be a games developer I’d have said they were mad. Yet… that’s what I did, for a while.
It all started with Sensaura, a small audio company that made a 3D sound library for use on soundcards for… games.
Games were evolving, moving away from PC’s onto consoles. So the need for soundcards was falling. Sensaura switched to some software, like a stereo expander called Jamma for WinAmp. It arrived late and did not sell well.
Then the sound library got ported to the PS2. That got us a library that was used on some games. I started to get involved, writing my first high level library on top of the 3D sound library. It was not a success, as I’d no experience of writing for consoles. Another engineer took over and rewrote it, and GameCoda was born.
I worked on an MFC application called CAGE Producer, a tool to help sound engineers get audio into a game. It started with the basics, the sound banks then added the more higher level objects.
I wrote a DirectX previewer so we could see scenes created with 3ds MAX and with our sound library. Then we used a 3D game engine called Alchemy that we got a free license for – that gave us PC, Xbox, PS2 and GameCube.
I created plugins for 3ds MAX and Maya to export our audio with Alchemy data.
The PC and Xbox were easy – they were pretty much the same for development. The PS2 was a harder battle. I remember working with a test PS2 to get networking on it (DLink USB) so an artist could load up a scene with audio and play it back.
Except, nobody used the pipeline that way.
It was a good way to show off our tech, but games weren’t made that way.
Then Creative bought Sensaura, and I sensed the end was in sight for us. Sure enough, two years after buying us, they announced the reduction in R&D and closed EMU in the States and us in the UK.
So, I’m out of a job.
By now, I’m working on OpenAL for Xbox 360 with Codemasters. They wanted a cross platform audio solution and this was their choice. I reworked it, removing unnecessary locking and speeding it up… and fix a number of crazy bugs.
When I was made redundant, I asked my contact at Codemasters if he wanted a tools programmer for audio. He said yes, and I joined Codies in 2007.