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echolevel

@echolevel.co.uk

600 followers 170 following 160 posts

Brendan O'Callaghan Ratliff - Audio Director/Coder, Sound Designer & Composer at Cardboard Sword Games • Film Sound • BBC radio drama • Irish traditional music • chiptune/demoscene stuff as Syphus^UpRough https://echolevel.co.uk

echolevel.co.uk

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echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · May 20

Our game is finally released today!
The Siege and The Sandfox is a 2D #metroidvania with gorgeous pixelart; stealth-based gameplay; and lots of dynamic music and game audio by meee.

4pm GMT on Steam, Epic & GoG for PC
store.steampowered.com/app/653060/T...

#indiedev #gameaudio #unrealengine

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echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · 5d

Gonna tell my kids this was Battlefleet Gothic

Five Star - System Addict (Video)

YouTube video by FiveStarVEVO

www.youtube.com

echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · 10d

At this point I'm like "if it wasn't plugged in already, did I even need it?" and then I sell it and it's someone else's problem.

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echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · 15d

Ideally you'd turn up in a balaclava, Jacquard loom-woven with a QR code pattern that audience members can scan to listen to your Strudel jam, or not scan if they'd rather imagine it in contemplative silence, while you stand there as an impassive receptacle for their projected emotions.

echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · 15d

Thanks!

Strudel - I've seen a few vids floating around, yeah! Not had time to try it, but it did remind me of the time I wrote a livecoding language so I could play an algorave set and then never touched it again. It was fairly shit, and in Java! Doing one in the browser (and properly) is very wise

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echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · 15d

Completely missed this fresh summer banger at the time, so now I'm recontextualising it for myself as a mulled autumn... banger.

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Reposted by echolevel

Dane Law @danelaw.bsky.social · Jul 3

Out today on Evel Records: Dane Law "The Black Path"

A collection of pieces recorded in summer 2024 when I lived at the intersection of the boundary of the historic Danelaw and the Black Path, an ancient traders' route.

Max MSP controlled sampled guitar; the last solo album with those materials.

evel @evelrecords.bsky.social · Jul 3

The black path
by Dane Law (｡･∀･)ﾉﾞ
Digt.ed. St/Hd 96/24
@evel_records
evel.bandcamp.com/album/the-bl...

The black path, by Dane Law

9 track album

evel.bandcamp.com

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echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · 18d

Dia duit! Everyone else "Let your vowels be lyrical and poetic, as if softened by the rain: 'hwuiht'". Ulster "aye rhyme it with 'bitch'"

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echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · 22d

My actual day job (one of them, anyway) is to compose 90s atmospheric drum and bass, in the custom tracker wot I wrote, for a video game. The game responds to the music data and vice versa. In 1994 I hoped I’d get a job doing this on the Amiga when I grew up - close enough.

#gameaudio #demoscene

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Reposted by echolevel

echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · Sep 8

Metron Tracker standalone is a feature-complete 2.4MB exe! This example song is 2.6MB on disk and its memory footprint is 3.7MB. Playback averages 2% of audio CPU budget.

That leaves me ~4GB and 98% CPU to spend on ambient fart emitters with convolution verb

#UnrealEngine #middleware #gameaudio

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echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · Sep 8

I’ll be reposting this throughout the day because I’m so happy that I’ve finally written a little tracker, which is all I ever really wanted to do. Downhill from here.

echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · Sep 8

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echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · Sep 6

Wrote a new sample loader for Metron standalone so all the oldskool tracker commands are back! No DSP effects here, just sample manipulation - very cheap on CPU. Multisample instruments at diff octaves played randomly, but all share 1 buffer in mem.

#gameaudio #gamedev #unrealengine #middleware

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echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · Sep 1

I even did an entire built-in documentation view, in the style of Protracker/FastTracker 'online' help. Because I'm an idiot and can't remember all the commands I added and/or what some of them do.

But it feels good to be dep-free! Should be easy to wrap back into USynthComponent and #MetaSound

echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · Sep 1

It got really loud somewhere in the porting process, whoops. Sample instruments still WIP (need to decide on a portable way to load and store PCM that still plays nice with #UE5) and some UI is to-do or janky. Also the UI inflates my CPU budget stats - in UE this load would report more like 5%

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echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · Sep 1

I rewrote my #unrealengine tracker in raw C++ so it’s a 3.5 megabyte exe instead of a 35GB engine/project. This is a core player engine with a Win32 wrapper and a UE plugin wrapper. Testing with my hybrid FM/phase distortion synth and waveform blending LFO, and my cheesy-but-cheap reverb algo

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echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · Jul 15

Awesome that @unrealengine.bsky.social lets you do this, but BOY do you learn about threading the hard way. Only realtime audio lets you shoot yourself in the foot 48000 times per second

echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · Jul 15

And while in the past I had a janky dance with a SynthComponent wrapping other SynthComponents and instancing an entire submix architecture on the fly, now *everything* is done in one SC where I can measure DSP work properly and segment the audio callback for sample-accurate timing

echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · Jul 15

Well...slightly higher CPU usage in Unreal Editor. But that includes send effects (reverb, delay, chorus); group buss effects (anything, in any order - just a few EQs and compressors for now); master chain (compressor and limiter). The group buss compressors can be sidechained from other busses.

echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · Jul 15

I wrote a combined sample reverse & pitchslide up/down command for my #UnrealEngine runtime tracker! (also optimised everything to hell - this tune inc DSP FX uses ~2% of my CPU budget and a ~500kb memory footprint - but who cares, jungle reeewind spinback is what I'm excited about) #gameaudio

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echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · Jul 10

He was about to write Marillion and then said to himself "but hang on, I'm one rung above those pub bore clichés" and wrote Dave Greenslade instead. "Phew, now she'll know I'm Roger Dean-adjacent but not *too* on the nose"

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echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · Jun 17

Cheers! And no worries, same here 😅

echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · Jun 8

Another legendary demoscener gone too soon: my pal StingRay of Scoopex. Everyone in the scene has a "StingRay fixed my shitty code" story, me included; my fondest party memories are of hanging out, hearing about his granny smuggling C64s into East Berlin, chatting industrial music & VW Golfs. RIP

_lemon @andylemon.bsky.social · Jun 8

RIP Stingray / Scoopex :(
eab.abime.net/showthread.p...

RIP StingRay - English Amiga Board

RIP StingRay Amiga scene

eab.abime.net

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echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · Jun 8

Wtf

echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · May 26

With Metron, you _can_ send it note events directly from gameplay, specifying instrument and velocity etc, and also a desired quantise boundary; it'll add those to a queue and trigger them at the correct time (or the next equivalent time). But I don't do that in this game.

echolevel @echolevel.co.uk · May 26

When I say the mix system handles those gameplay events, I mean that those notes just exist perpetually in the tracker song, but they're ignored until a mix state change enables the note event. This allows them to be in musical sync, but silent without using any resources.

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