The first PC I owned didn't have a sound card and I couldn't have cared less because sound wasn't exactly the PC's strong point. This has changed considerably over the last few years. At Elixir we believe that future advances in game music and sound will, in time, be considered to be comparable to the 3D graphics revolution of the mid 90s.

Nick Sturge, our Tools manager is in charge of audio for all of Elixir's games. Here he discusses sound and Republic: The Revolution "With this game we want to depict the epic events that shape a country's future, and your rise to power within that country. To create the immersive cinematic experience that conveys the scale of these events, music and sound effects are critical.

Early on we decided to work with an external sound effects artist and composer and we chose Richard Joseph and James Hannigan. They are, without, two of the best and most experienced and best musicians working in the games industry and have worked on some great games like Barbarian, Defender of the Crown, Speedball 2, Mega Lo Mania, Sensible Soccer and more recently Croc, G-Police and Theme Park World. They were nominated for a staggering four BAFTAs at this year's awards (Best Sound: Theme Park World, Best Sound: Cannon Fodder, Best Music: Theme Park World, Best Music: FA Premier Football Manager ' 99).

Using external people has a number of benefits. Firstly, you'd be very pushed to get people of this quality to come in house. It also means that we didn't need to build an expensive soundproofed studio in our offices. There's also the question of flexibility; in the early stages when the design was still being finalised there wasn't enough work to keep them busy full-time. Now in the later stages of development there is more then enough.

Producing audio isn't the only part of the process; someone needs to code it into the game and that's where I come into it. I'm principally a programmer, and most of my work is on Republic and its design and development tools. However, as well as being quite technical I have a background in classical music, and was very keen to take on the audio programming. The main part of this work has been customising how the different sorts of audio will be triggered and played: we need support for one-off effects, repeating effects, area-based sounds and the music playback code itself. A good overview of the project is also important, as I need to work with the artificial intelligence, animations and camera control to ensure that effects are triggered correctly.

Audio technology has certainly seen interesting developments recently and we must decide what technologies to use and how to deliver the audio in game. With potentially tens of hours of gameplay, simple linear CD tracks could quickly become dull and repetitive and would occupy a lot of valuable space on the CD. Microsoft's DirectMusic offers exciting possibilities but also offers problems because it randomises music. If you create a track with a lot of possible variations, the system might randomly play something quite unpleasant to listen to. Instead we have been looking into ways of achieving a similar effect in a more controlled way by coding this ourselves. We have also had to consider what 3D sound and proprietary hardware support we want to include, and what this will cost us in terms of processor usage.

A lot of action within the game revolves around in game characters talking to one another. We have various choices here. We could duck out and not have any speech in the game in the game at all but this would have been a real shame as speech is an important means of conveying a lot of emotion that would otherwise be hard to get across. At the other extreme, we could go for complete actual speech, where we script out everything any character might say within the game, record it, and play it back appropriately. This would involve a huge amount of material not to mention the issue of language. Which language would it be in? Republic is set in Eastern Europe, so we could pick a language and then prepare material in that language, or do it in English. We chose an intermediate solution, which was to have speech-like noises that don't actually mean anything. "The Sims" did this quite well, and the results we've had so far are very promising.

By far the most important aspect of audio design is for it to integrate seamlessly into the whole game experience. We have decided on special music to accompany the actions, for maximum cinematic effect. As well as conveying the scale of events, this also emphasises the emotions and atmosphere, be it for a massive political rally or a SAS-style raid and assassination. The sound effects must tie in with the animations as well as providing a good background environment. Richard's put a lot of work into creating authentic sounds. He's gone to amazing lengths to achieve this - for example, so that the cars sound right he tracked down the Trabant Society of Great Britain and went off and recorded the sound of a real Trabant engine. This is the level of excellence that we're aiming to achieve with Republic: The Revolution."