Agenda
'Gears of War: E-Day' Building Immersive Worlds Through Ambience and Interactive Audio
Mickey Marian (Senior Audio Software Engineer, The Coalition)
Edward Bauman (Audio Design Lead, The Coalition)
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Track:
Audio, Programming
Audience Level:
All
Format:
Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: All
In Gears of War: E-Day, every footstep tells a story. From distant gunfire echoing through broken streets to rubble shifting under your boots, we wanted the world to sound as detailed and reactive as it looks. Our goal was to build the most ambitious environmental audio detail The Coalition has ever attempted, where every space and tiny interaction helps make the world feel immersive. We also needed to do it at scale without compromising frame rate or memory budgets. This session breaks down the two core systems that made that possible. The first is our high-density procedural ambience solution; the second is our voxel-based material response override system.
Takeaway
Attendees will leave with concrete takeaways for building large-scale environmental audio. How to represent dense spatial detail with minimal per-point cost, how to combine hierarchical culling with thread-friendly updates, how to layer material response override logic without expensive collision proxies to achieve things like foliage interaction audio, and how to align these systems with streaming architecture.
Intended Audience
This talk is aimed at audio programmers, audio designers, and technical sound designers who want practical, data-backed methods for delivering immersive, micro-detailed environmental audio within real production budgets.