Fred discussing sound development for SWBF1

[Phobos]

Message:     "Be patient, I'm working on a new version of BFBuilder.hta that will add easy side and mission editing functionality."

Aye, I'll just wait for that then.

"The sound effects in the game are the sounds from the movie"

I must beg to differ. Listen to the DC-15 rifle and pistol, Battle Droid blaster rifle/SBD wrist blaster (this was taken from other games like The Phantom Menace), AAT blasters, AT-ST cannons, Droid Starfighter sound and blasters, and more...

Message:     Beg to differ all you want, if they weren't from the movie materials I could have included them with the tools. The sounds were created by a sound designer named Nick Peck who works for Skywalker sound and he provided everything from the films and supplemented them where sounds didn't exist. We even called Ben Burtt, the guy who created them for the films a few times when we were having problems making the sounds work in a real environment.

There were a few small in game changes such as the AAT's blaster is not the AATs blaster but rather the Droideka's blaster because they felt hearing the AAT's real blaster would become really annoying. That and there were some sounds that were supplementing the movie sounds like the jetpack, ordnance hums, real clonetrooper and droid footsteps that never existed before because they were digital characters, etc. We had the hardest time with the weak rifle sounds of the rebels which became the pistol sounds and we used the heaviest blaster sound for their default rifle, and there were some changes to vehicles like the ATST which had a weapon changed so the blaster on it is actually the secondary blaster on both sides and the primary was removed (which sucks because the ATST was once set up right with a rocket launcher and secondary blaster on one position and a promary blaster on the other. The reason is the vehicle was too powerful and the copilot in charge of the two weapons couldn't aim while someone else was driving the walker.

Some of the engine sounds were tough too, the sounds from the films are typically flyby sounds and not set up for really coming from an object moving through a world, so we had to change some things to give them a heavy enough sounds, but that was mostly controlling the pitch and layering them dynamically. I'm actually proud of the TIE Fighter, we spent at least an hour in the sound studio listening to it in 5.1 trying to get the gutteral roar sound to come out at the right speeds. Finally I had the idea of mixing the layers of the TIE fighter with the TIE bomber whose engine was heavier by default, and the combo when we matched it up to the new DVDs before they even came out was dead on. That was cool because our engines have real dynamics all based on the vehicle's speed and acceleration, which you don't see in the films.

If you think things don't sound the same it's because these were created from the original files to be used as reaslitic sounds and not as sounds applied to a scene in the movie. When you put on a sound on real object where you occupy the same space with it it does not sound like a movie. What you hear in the movies are not presented in the same context so they don't sound the same. The game takes the same sounds and uses them realistically rather than as something that is customized specifically for frames presented on screen. This actually posed a lot of problems for us.

You're sort of right about the SBD, it's the right sound, the wrong weapon. Same with the BD, it's weapon was weak sounding by default so it was upgraded. I'm not sure but the BDs in the naboo historical campaign may be right. If not they use the heavy vs the weak sounding blaster. One problem we faced was having people want to play as the battledroids, so we had to make them seem strong by making their weapon sound heavier and not seem like the toys they were in the movie. The sound you're hearing it the battledroid's rifle because that's what they changed the weapon to rather than what you see in the movie. And you're right about the droid starfighter I think, I seem to remember we had to use another vehicles blasters for that but I don't recall why. It was either memory or that it sounded bad in a game environment.

Source: http://www.secretsociety.com/forum/display_message.asp?mid=51