Gears of War 4 Project Triton: Pre-Computed Environmental Wave Acoustics

John Tennant & Nikunj Raghuvanshi, February 2017

Project Triton is the first successful effort for detailed scene-dependent wave acoustics in games. Triton will ship in ‘Gears of War 4’, resulting from a collaboration between The Coalition and Microsoft Research. Triton robustly models complex wave phenomena such as diffraction, scattered reflections, and reverberation on static 3D level geometry. In doing so, it captures important effects like smooth occlusion around obstacles or longer reverberation in large halls, as well as how these effects change when source and listener move through the environment. Nikunj and John will discuss both the technical and design aspects of the system, providing details on its integration in Unreal Engine 4 and AudioKinetic Wwise. They will also discuss how interpreting the Triton data forced them to define stylized cinematic and emotional acoustics for ‘Gears of War 4’ to navigate their way out of an uncanny valley of game audio.