Deus Ex: Invisible War Designer Diary

Deux Ex: Invisible War's project director Harvey Smith and designer Kent Hudson talk about the upcoming sequel in a new designer diary on IGN. Check it out:
A crucial component of our physics-sound system was giving as much control as possible to the sound designers. They're the ones who will be putting the sounds in and tweaking them, after all. So, our final system gave them the abilities to hook up different sounds for objects sliding and rolling and bouncing and crashing against one another, and to differentiate the sounds based on the two objects' materials & weights. Furthermore, they could special-case sounds for specific objects, if they wanted, since a bullet hitting a wall doesn't really sound like a generic "light metal object" hitting the wooden wall. Then, finally, we had knobs to adjust the pitch and volume of the sounds based on how hard objects hit each other, how fast they were rolling, and a host of other parameters.