q3osc: or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Game

 q3osc is a heavily modified version of the open-sourced ioquake3 gaming engine featuring an integrated Oscpack implementation of Open Sound Control for bi-directional communication between a game server and one or more external audio servers. By combining ioquake3’s internal physics engine and robust multiplayer network code with a full-featured OSC packet manipulation library, the virtual actions and motions of game clients and previously one-dimensional in-game weapon projectiles can be repurposed as independent and behavior-driven OSC emitting sound-objects for real-time networked performance and spatialization within a multi-channel audio environment. This paper details the technical and aesthetic decisions made during the development and initial implementations of q3osc and introduces specific mapping and spatialization paradigms currently in use for sonification.