In this installment of guest blogger Frank Klepacki’s series on music production, Frank concludes his three-part series on remastering the audio for Command & Conquer. If you missed Frank’s previous post, you can read it here.

IMPLEMENTATION

After restoring all the audio assets and remastering them in relation to each other, now it was time to balance all of this within the actual game!

Implementation is yet another technical audio hat to wear when working with video games and is just as much work as creating the assets. The advantage of doing this remaster, though, was that the code was already calling all the appropriate sound effects during gameplay, and it was a 2D game instead of 3D, so we didn’t have 3D position or surround sound to worry about, just panning left to right positional audio.

The first hurdle to overcome was our naming conventions of all the assets in relation to their original counterparts. Back then names of files couldn’t be too long, so many were abbreviated. The issue was that some sound effects had the same names as different sounds used in different games in our collection. So, we had to add prefixes to each sound effect to determine which game it was from, and which version of the sound was being played (classic or remastered version).

The second hurdle in implementing was to then script presets for “types” of sounds that would include parameters for things like volume, panning, distance hearing radius, etc. Then we would apply these presets to things like UI sounds, ambience, weapons, voices, and music, and then we would dial in individual parameter overrides for special-case individual sounds if something felt too loud or too quiet in context of the gameplay, even though it was already balanced in relation to the assets. This is the equivalent of setting up buses in a mix, but in the game itself. So, then we could balance the overall mix of the major groups of sounds.

In the end, a lot of love went into preserving the best-quality versions of these classic games as a remastered collection, and the amount of bonus content we packaged with it was huge. Everything from behind-the-scenes B-roll footage to team photos and bonus music tracks. Since the collection’s release, the reception has been extremely positive and has set the bar for the remastered treatment of games.

The Command & Conquer Remastered Collection is available on Steam and Origin:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1213210/Command__Conquer_Remastered_Collection/

https://www.ea.com/games/command-and-conquer/command-and-conquer-remastered

The Command & Conquer Remastered Collection soundtracks are available on various streaming services:

C&C Remastered: https://open.spotify.com/album/6diK51gAlxp4pbpmoe8Ahc

Red Alert Remastered: https://open.spotify.com/album/0PVfiTe7jFoMIcKr4yvkEk

Frank Klepacki & The Tiberian Sons – Celebrating 25 years of Command & Conquer:

https://open.spotify.com/album/1BdrAyFCmYxsu3aGzQwIt0

Frank Klepacki is an award-winning composer, sound designer, audio director, recording artist, touring performer, and producer. He has worked on top video game titles such as Command & Conquer, Star Wars: Empire at War, and MMA sports television programs such as Ultimate Fighting Championship and Inside MMA. For more info, visit www.frankklepacki.com

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