ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some of the tools that are used in open-world games at Ubisoft. It provides a high-level survey of the sorts of tools for ambiences in open-world games that developers customize their own purposes. A set of simple tools are used instead of very complex system for everything. Hence, the memory and CPU cost is minimized. The most fundamental concept for ambiences is to split the game into sound regions. The regions represent those areas which are expected to hear different ambience sounds. One of the main problems with randomized effects is to keep enough aural variation so that players do not notice repetition, while keeping the memory footprint as low as possible. While there are many approaches to implement this transition, one good option is to use a "leaving distance" for each room in the game. The leaving distance is used as an automatic fade-out distance when the player is leaving a room for an outdoor ambience.
