Filip “Pip” Oscadal was responsible for the sounds in Vietcong's game levels, animations, trailers, weapons and the speaking parts. He worked closely with Chalim Zbleka, creator of Vietcong’s sound engine.
TakeTwo gave PTERODON a very low budget to make Vietcong. Filip was expected to use lower cost sound libraries for the gunshots, jungle sounds, etc. But many games already used these same sounds and besides, there were just not many sounds in these databases. Filip resorted to recording as many original sounds as he could. He recorded himself walking in Brno and Olomouc, jumping on logs in the forest, and crawling in the mud. At the Brno dam, Filip recorded the sounds of the waves and rustling trees. The Lisn quarry proved ideal for recording nature because it was very isolated from other sounds.
He tried to record monkeys at the Brno Zoo, but the monkeys were just not into it. The only sound Filip got from the Brno zoo was an oriental owl. When Filip tried to record an earthworm there, a child called him “crazy.” Filip remembers "The hardest sound to achieve is the one you just can’t get. In the Vietcong, for example, it is the sound of a flying tropical dragonfly, because they are somewhat larger than ours. Just the idea of filming Czech dragonflies scared me." Biology consultants Ivan Horacek and Jan Hosek let PTERODON use many of their Southeast Asia jungle sounds.
The buzzing fly that all Vietcong players remember was a happy accident. While Filip was recording ambient nature sounds near Kunmi, a fly flew past the microphone. It took an hour for Filip to find this sound on the day’s recordings but he found it and he used it. Filip recorded vehicle sounds by leaning out of (Bear)’s off-road vehicle to pick up the sounds of the wheels, the uneven terrain, going over bumps, etc. One of the most difficult tasks was recording the sound of barrels falling from a height, especially how far the sound should carry outwards from its point source.
Weapon sounds were recorded at the Prague Weapons Museum, at the same time when the graphic artists took photos of the weapons. Pip used an AKG directional shotgun microphone with phantom power and an MZ-700 MiniDisk recorder.
Pip created the EAX editor for working with 3D (spatial) sound effects and music. By 2000, computer memory was no longer a limitation so Filip used all sixteen audio channels on the SoundBlaster AWE64 sound card.
Pip came up with an innovative system whereby the sound reacted dynamically to what the player was doing. He allocated three-channels for 1) idle, 2) walking, and 3) firing. Roman Zigo wrote “If player was lying in the grass, the sound began to focus on the immediate surroundings (flies, crickets, clapping his hands while crawling...). If player was shooting, the sounds of the surroundings were markedly suppressed, as they have no meaning for the player importance. [Filip] called this dynamic allocation system—LivingJungle.” Until Vietcong, background sounds were static, that is, there was only one background track that was looped.
Roman Zigo continued, “The LivingJungle system was based on the fact that when a player runs and shoots, it emits events at a specific volume level, and those events continue to recursively generate other events, so when the player begins shooting, the sounds of screaming frightened monkeys began to be heard in the nearby forest, after which the monkeys fall silent for awhile. They had a fixed position from which the sounds came, but they were only triggered by a high-noise event.” Roman notes that “When the character touches an object in space .... they had prepared up to fifteen possible interactions with each material used in the game.” The sounds are different sounds for when the player falls on a rock or down the stairs, for example.
For flowing water, Filip used a spline curve for the river, whereby the sound of flowing water moved to the center of the screen when a player was close enough to the river. Filip insisted there should be a crackle during—and a squawk at the beginning—and end of each radio call.
Filip was asked about leaning out of a car while recording. He remembers "That might have been a bit dangerous. We were all young, so it didn’t seem that way to us. I said to Medvěd: “Start the car, I’m going downhill from here.” Then you turn off the engine, I’m going to lean out and hang with that microphone and I’m going to take it from underneath what the car’s going to do.” The slapping of everything that’s in there. Shoes, grass… everything. We drove off that cliff, we made it down, without any injuries. Sometimes the Bear (Medvěd) drove at me like a fairway and braked 5 meters away from me. How else to rotate the skids, it must be rotated by contact. Once we jumped over the river with his car and broke the axle there, and Michal Janáček was not happy about it, but he paid for it. There were some write-offs. It was probably the most expensive sound effect in the entire Vietcong."
For Fist Alpha, Filip bought liver and chicken and brought it in to the Drax sound studio. He recorded the sounds of a knife cutting up the meat to represent stabbing. Drax employees watched in amazement as the knife cut up the chicken bones. The knife was thrust into the chicken livers again and again. "I had to remind everyone not to laugh," Filip remembers. It made such an impression on Drax that they gave PTERODON the studio time for free.
Filip created a 150-byte program that synced the dubbing to the mouth animations. He used a fast Fourier transform to recognize individual vowels and those that make syllables (s, a, e, o, i) which then made it easy to process the animations. This had never been done before.
Thanks to Filip's hard work, PTERODON’s sound bank grew to 2400 effects and 6000 dubbing messages.
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Source: Zigo, Roman. “Specifics of computer game sound design practice in the Czech environment.” Master's Thesis. Masaryk University, 2014.
Source: https://www.youtu...zLcFR-jQLs This is the VisionGame interview with Filip Oscadal on YouTube.
Source: Petr, Michael. "FPI: Filip Oščádal And Fred Brooker, Fish Fillets, Flying Heroes, Vietcong …." Interview, 17 March 2023.
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