It also let us scale up the complexity and amount of sounds that play at any one time, letting us flesh out a world as varied and detailed as GTA IV at times were playing thousands of individual sounds simultaneously. Stand in the street and youll hear three different radio stations at any one time coming from passing vehicles, all sounding appropriately tinny or boomy, depending on the type of vehicle and whether its doors are open, its windows broken, etc.
We have around four-and-a-half thousand individual sfx in the game, which are combined into around 19 thousand different combinations. Thats ignoring the insane amount of dialogue, cutscenes and radio content.
In the case of the peds, each character is given a back-story, his or her behaviors are sorted out, and then using this information a script is written. This can be anything from 20 lines of dialogue (for peds who are used only in very specific situations) up to 300 lines. An average ped will have about 200 lines of dialogue.
Its difficult to quantify how many speaking parts there are, but at our last count there were over 740 unique voices in the game. There are over 80,000 individual lines of dialogue, more than 7000 of which are Nikos lines. If you were to listen to each line back to back, it would take over 29 hours. Also, these figures dont take the radio, TV, and mo-capped cut-scene dialogue into consideration.
Sam Houser had a clear vision for the music on GTA IV. It was very important to present a soundtrack that displayed a contemporary, fresh sound that reflects Liberty City, its residents, cultures, fashions and locations. It was decided early on that contemporary Hip Hop, Dance Rock and Russian music should take up a lot of the airwaves.
The DJS have far more AI than previous titles. They know what time of day it is, what the weather is like and whats going on in LC. They've even done their research on their playlists, some of their own tracks appears on them.