TL;DRClaudius is progressing steadily as a systemic audio tool, and they're hopeful of an internal release with it active in the build in a few months, though it won't yet drive all audio.
Yes, I'll take that since it's my baby, I guess. So we've been progressing steadily. What we showed back at CitizenCon was a tech demo. And as you know, tech demos are not always fully rounded, finished features. So what we were showing was some of the design decisions we've made about how Claudius was going to work, and we demonstrated a little bit of that. But one of the big decisions that we made behind Claudius was that every single audio feature becomes systemic. And that's a huge undertaking. It means that we've got to go through every single game system that exists, right down from the tiny little things like the jukebox all the way up to capital ships and everything in between, every single feature. And we have to implement those features in the tool, in Claudius, and in the underlying CIG audio engine. That allows us to make all of those features available to designers where they choose to put them. So it's a really big undertaking. We're making really good progress on it, and we're hopeful that it's only going to be a few more months before we can actually release something with Claudius active inside the build. That won't be where Claudius is actually driving the whole audio of the game, because that's sort of the longer-term goal, to replace every system. But things are progressing really well. We've got some really great features coming in. I do hope that we can talk about it again in another video, maybe in a few months' time or something. I'm not sure when it will be. But we've got a lot of really good plans for it, and we want it to be a real sort of revelation for designers when it comes out. So we're not releasing it until it's ready to be used. So that's the big thing. It's not under wraps as such, but it's still germinating.
And backers and watchers of the show are used to hearing the word release apply to the moment when they get their hands on it. You're, of course, talking about a release internally, to when folks like Jack over here get to use it. And like many of our procedural or systemic tools, it's not designed to take the work away from the designers and do the work for them, but just provide them more tools and more capabilities in order to be more efficient and more successful in the creation of their content.
I was just going to say, really quickly, to chime in: it's really about letting the creatives be creative. What happens when you don't have a great tool set, or a tool set that's quite aged? There's a lot of extra work that has to go into getting what you want out of it. And it's a lot of time sink. It's just a lot of faff. And so the sound designers have to spend a lot of time in that world when it would be much better for them to be doing more creative work. And so that's really the whole meaning behind this, just to get the creatives to do more creative work. And that's the big key.
Yeah, the way I put it is the whole design is workflow first. So we look at a good workflow and then we build all the infrastructure behind it that allows it to happen.
TL;DRThey say surround is fully supported by their engine and Wwise, were surprised by the report, and will investigate and treat it as critical, noting better 5.1 authoring and testing spaces are coming.
So this was an interesting question because, to a large extent, we've all been working from home on headphones and everything sounds as it should, right? Because we've got a left and a right and that's all you need, because you've only got two ears, if you're on that side of the argument, which we're not, obviously. So surround is fully supported by both our engine and the Wwise engine that we use, the middleware that we use. And I think we will have to investigate why this user is experiencing what they're experiencing, because we do fully support 5.1 and 7.1 as output modes in Wwise. And it may just be there's some sort of setup issue there. But it's definitely something that's not so easy for us to check when we're mostly at home on headphones. So yeah, we will dig into that one, because it came as a little surprise to hear that question.
Yeah, the new building. I was actually going to touch on that too. Even the space that I'm here in, Freedom House, the room here is too small for a 5.1, and most of our spaces here are. We do have the Apollo, and we're able to do 5.1 in there, but as Graham says, a lot of us are still working from home. But in the new office, each of our pods will be 5.1, and the new mix space there is going to be a flagship 7.1 Atmos, and it's going to be a fantastic room to do proper mixing in. Part of the thing, too, is authoring content in 5.1. We don't have the tools at the moment to really author that content as well in that kind of sense. There's a lot of it that's just really for us as designers to get in there and be able to have proper spaces and proper tools to really make that 5.1 experience shine. And, as Graham also said, debugging and testing.
TL;DRAn in-game radio isn't a hard no, but licensing and rights problems make it tricky; the team expects more in-fiction music and artists, and says something will probably happen eventually, though form is unknown.
This question comes up quite frequently. There are a number of ways to do this kind of thing, whether it's the GTA style, where we license a bunch of music and curate it on individual radio stations and just let people tune in and play to that, whether we contract out with folks and create an entirely original selection of 30th-century rock songs or whatnot to fill the thing, or what a lot of people tend to ask for is the ability to broadcast their own radio. And then that ends up opening up a whole other can of worms between legal and content rights. I'm sure most people who are watching on Twitch right now are no stranger to the situation with the RIAA and playing music. I mean, if you had an in-game radio station that you could run, the whole purpose of it was that you would want other people to hear it. So if you were playing Star Citizen and you turned a corner and heard somebody else's radio station playing a song that the RIAA is currently looking out for on Twitch, and you are streaming at the time, you get your channel banned because this person over here was streaming. There are lots of considerations for that kind of stuff. It's not a hard no. The situation is always changing and evolving, all manner of new tech solutions come up. Old backers will remember the jukebox in the player hangars that let you play your own MP3s in the hangar, and it radiated through your own personal hangar and stuff. So that's not to say that there's not some middle ground to be found.
I can at least say that from narrative's point of view, Dave Haddock has definitely been out there, interested in having lore and having actual musicians and music in fiction in Star Citizen. So we do expect to have that music in there; whether we'll have enough, or how long it would take to get enough to warrant a full-on in-fiction radio station, we'll see, right? But at least there will be expectations of having more in-fiction music and artists that are actually part of the universe, rather than just us composing what we think 30th-century music would be.
But in case the answer sounds like a no and folks get disheartened, I will say that this comes up internally so often, like Bob just said, speaking on behalf of Dave Haddock and stuff. I have to imagine, based on how long I've been here and the people that I work with, that something will happen at some point. It's just another diegetic, very immersion-building aspect of this universe we're trying to build. So I can't tell you what form or shape it's going to end up in ultimately, but there's too many people here who want something for something never to materialize.
TL;DRAll sounds already have a distance attenuation based on real-life values, and planned audio tech may let distant space battles be heard more depending on context, though some cases need different content.
Yeah, so we try to scale all sounds based on real-life values. So every sound in the game will have an attenuation on it, which determines the total distance the sound can travel. And the further away you get from the source, it'll start tailing off in volume and be filtered down as well. So yeah, we're already doing that in the game.
Yeah, I think the suggestion in the question might be that they want to hear more of the distant stuff. And I think we have some plans in the tech involved in CIG Audio and Claudius that will allow us to be more responsive to situational differences. Based on the context of the game, we might allow more distant space battles if there isn't a close-by space battle going on at the same time, I think. So yeah, it's all part of that design. Give us plenty of time and sometime we can make improvements in that area as well.
In some cases, too, it is actually a bit of different content. We have to have different content for those different contextual switches, in some cases, to really get it to shine properly and mix right and all those things. So it's not just as simple as taking a gun sound and just that gun sound being that far away. As Graham said, having Claudius will really help us with crowding and distancing and doing things in a much more efficient manner as well.
TL;DRA ship PA system will happen and the tech is progressing in locations, with ship prototyping next, then player speech over it, though rolling it across all ships is a big undertaking and abuse is a concern.
Actually, I remember that question last year. That is definitely something I personally feel pretty passionate about. Yes, there will be. And we've actually made progress on that tech. So last time we spoke about it, we were starting to get it to the point where we had some of these dynamic events with these mission-driven PAs being broadcast into multiple locations and off of speaker arrays and things like that. And that was taking the fundamental basics of how this would work, having a source being broadcast across to multiple receivers. And since then, with this last Fleet Week and Siege Wars, we've pushed that further and did some more robust work with it. There's still next steps after that, which would be to have a bit more finer detail on the types of PA and the speaker arrays, so we can have better detail between a hallway PA versus a room versus the bigger hangars and things like that. And then next after that is to take it to an actual ship. We've been doing these mostly in locations and whatnot. So now we need to take a ship as an example, as a prototype, and do it there. What would probably be the source would be the ship computer. So we'll look at warnings and crits, and we would like for that to actually, like this is suggesting, have the PA broadcast through the ship and tell the whole ship that you're about to blow up. But that's going to take that prototyping. And then, as you can probably imagine, taking that one markup for that one ship and putting it across our whole fleet of ships, that's going to be quite an undertaking. We'd like to do that the most efficient way as well. But one step further is to take it so it's not just the ship computer or any kind of system voice doing that, but to give the player interaction to actually speak into this PA, in a targeted room. For example, they've just rescued some guy and he's in their cargo bay. You can actually say, I'm talking directly to the cargo bay, and say, hey, welcome to my ship, blah, blah, blah, and have it come out of the PA speakers, and that person will go, oh, cool, thanks, and whatnot. So that kind of level of detail is really what we're after. And as you can see, it's going to take a few iterations of tech and steps to get there, but we're on our way and we're making progress.
And you're pretty clear on that all the way up until you get to the parts where players can speak over it. At that point, you run into the same considerations in-game radio has. Now, in-game radio we'd broadcast server-wide or whatever, but this is still the ability to change your virtual microphone to an MP3 out and blast music over your spaceship and stuff. So for folks who want it, you have a tremendous champion in Bob here.
Yeah, we'll have to see if it's something to be more client-side, or if it's a person in your group or something, and not to the full-on server. But yeah, you're right, though, that open mic can be abused.
TL;DRA runtime voice-disguise filter already works on NPC voices, and extending it to player voice chat with more variations is something they'd like to do, but no commitment is given.
Yeah, we already do it essentially from the NPCs' standpoint. If you go to Lorville or anywhere you have the security guards where they have masks on, you can hear them through the mask, little Darth Vader-y kind of sounds. That's essentially a disguise filter that I've put on their voice as a runtime effect. So it's not something I've baked in there. If they were to remove their masks, you would hear them speak in their normal voice. So it is something that is already done. But again, it's one of those things where we have the tech, it's working. Now we need to have that player interaction and that player choice and be able to put it on the voice over IP so that we can have them use it and do that as well. So it's just moving that bar and extending it to players. And it is definitely something I would like to do. And also look into offering a lot more variations, obviously, and giving people enough play with it so that they can design and make their own disguise.
Yeah, tech-wise, I keep talking about CIG Audio and Claudius, but the whole design of this is that we allow the design of audio for this game to become more of a playground, more of a place where designers can play around and make interesting things. And there's absolutely no reason why voice effects couldn't be one of these things that is offered via the new audio engine once it comes online. So, yeah, maybe one day we'll have a bunch of people wandering around.
TL;DRRecent locations have gained more NPC chatter and background crowd noise, with older locations being filled out and a dynamic crowd system wanted in future, pending tech choices and a costly voice-tool decision.
Oh, yes, yes, yes. So the last couple of locations, I think we've done a much better job. And the first test cases of really improving this were the cargo and refinery decks, which were location-generic, and they really had a great positive reception. The dialogue landscape has a foreground: actual AI interacting, words coming out of the AI's mouth. But then you have, sight unseen, this middle ground, the chatter that they're referring to, that we've really been focusing on. It doesn't have AI, it doesn't have any other stimuli other than that you're in a populated space and you want it to have that immersion and that feeling that there's life there when maybe there's not really anything actually triggering it. And that was a big thing that we did with these spaces. The one last thing is the base, the very background walla, which is that indiscernible, almost sound effect of dialogue, just filling the space. And we've added the layers of that, but it's still this static type thing that's just for these spaces. And we did this, I think, really well with Orison, where we went and picked out these densely populated areas that we knew would usually have that type of population, and we were able to add those chatters so that you had the dialogue even if the AI wasn't there really acting and vocalizing. And we had the walla in the background. So it's these layers compounding together that gives you a dialogue landscape and a feeling of life. But it's all still very much us attacking these spaces and whatnot. And we've taken this, Orison being a very good full prototype of doing that for a whole location, and we're now going back to Lorville and some of these other locations and really trying to fill them out as well. So we've taken this and we're generating more and more, and it's really helping. We've hit the hospitals with some vignette-type chatter. We want to do the habs as well. You're going to find some cool stuff: walking through the halls and hearing some weird stuff, especially in the more fun locations like Grim HEX. Get some cool stuff in there. And Pyro is going to be fun too, coming up with a lot of that outlaw stuff. That's actually where we're hoping to get a lot of the dialogue life, because we won't have as much character content for such a new location, right? So it's going to be really that middle ground and that background that will really help with those spaces. In our future, we would really like to have more of a dynamic walla system that can not just say that this is a space that has population and so we should treat it as such, but actually look at the populations dynamically, because it's not just NPCs roaming around, it's players. And we want to make sure that if you stand in a room with a bunch of players, that actually also feels like a densely populated space. You don't know when that's going to happen. It's going to be very dynamic. It's going to have a mood. It's going to have a population and all those things. We want to have a dynamic of the types of populations in there, and we'll take stems and a lot of sources of walla and mix appropriately to have you feel like that's the space that you're in. And that's going to take a lot of content. It's going to take a lot of tech and a lot of prototyping, a lot of work on it. But we have almost started the process. We're getting there. To be honest, we have some big choices to make with the type of software that we want to use, because part of the big thing that we want to do with creating so many assets is using text-to-speech and speech-to-speech, and using these kinds of tools to help bolster what recordings we already have, and really to help us generate the right amount of content without having to go and record and record a bunch of walla sessions. So we're looking at that tech right now, and it's quite a substantial monetary decision to make. So we need to do our homework. We need to do our research. We need to compare and weigh against and all those things. So we're at that level at the moment where we're about to engage with some good research. And then once we pick that, then we can really start to move on with getting a proper walla system in there. So that's, I'm sorry, I kind of blabbered on there.
TL;DRThey are looking at AI text-to-speech and speech-to-speech voices, mainly for system voices and extra lines, with actors still paid and credited, though unknown lore languages and uncanny-valley risks need research.
Yes, that is definitely a very good point. We can do that for NPCs. Mostly our target has been really for the system voices. I know there's a question down here on ship computer voices, so I'll save that for later, but a lot of system voices, especially with a lot of incremental game design: when we want to go record and cast an actor and get them in, we have an amount of lines for them, everything makes sense, we go in there and get enough content. But at some point later, you'll want to have this new gameplay feature, and that thing only has five lines, and you're like, okay, we now need to call this actor up to have them come back in and record five lines. Or if it's a work-from-home studio, whatever it is, they have basic minimum fees for sessions, and it's just not financially viable. So, especially for our iterative game development, we want to look at these AI-created voices and whatnot. But we also would like to be able to still pick and choose our talent, pick and choose the people we want to have in our game. And so we're looking at ways to be able to create our own voice packs and say, actor so-and-so, you're going to be the voice of this ship and we're going to go capture your essence, and be able to create a voice from you that we can then drive with our text-to-speech. Or speech-to-speech is another thing that we've been looking into too, where we can take a voice actor, and staff or anybody else can read off those lines in the way we like, but it'll sound like that person that we captured. And it's another way to bolster content without having to hire talent for just five lines a piece. But obviously we still pay them proper buyouts and proper licenses for their voice. We do make sure that the talent are treated well and that we do all the right legal things with that. It has been adopted in the industry. We're not the only ones to consider that. Film is also looking at ways to do better ADR. You have a project, a film, and there are requirements to say, oh, you can only ADR 10% with these speech-to-speech things, and then you're able to bolster it without having the guy come in for five lines or something. And that's a benefit. But we obviously are very keen on that, and we want to push forward with these AI or text-to-speech created voices and really have a lot more content to work with.
There are technical issues that need to be overcome, though, because I know some of these AI-generated speech samples do sound amazing, but a lot of that AI is trained on natural language and is trained on known language. And a lot of our language in lore isn't known and is a little bit tricky for some of these things. And it's really important that we make sure we don't end up in the uncanny valley, because I think when these AI generations get something wrong, you can really hear that it's not a person speaking. So yeah, it's a lot of research.
I love Tessa Bannister. The actor that plays that role, she's phenomenal. She's really sweet. It was great to get her back in last time we had her, and I'm sure we'll have her in again. I can only imagine, with her being such a fan favorite and a staff favorite. We love working with her. I would sure hope so.
TL;DRThe missing soundscape sounds like a bug that they'll look into, and they say such breakages are easy to miss, so they're working toward automated audio testing that isn't ready yet.
It's key to note that certain overarching implementations of systems and things like that do change over time. Quite often what happens is something else might happen inexplicably and go unnoticed because it was working before. And it's always hard to catch those things in game development. It really is. That's honestly why we have QA and the community sharing these types of things, because it really helps us catch those kinds of things: we've done it, it worked, and how do we know when it breaks?
It's also why we've got quite a big push going on internally for automatic testing. So one of the things we're aiming for is knowing what the response to a particular gameplay situation should be from the audio system and confirming that it is still the case from build to build. But we're not ready with that yet. So one day we'll have a system that can pick these things up before they go out.
TL;DRA full redesign of ship computer voices is on their plate, including unified warnings and manufacturer personality, but it depends on first choosing text-to-speech tech and nothing is fully signed off.
Yes. Now, I briefly touched on it with that other question, talking about the AI and having text-to-speech generating the voices and whatnot. And that's a big proponent in this redesign. We have it on the plate to completely overhaul and completely redesign the ship computer voices. And it really starts with that tech, buying into that tech and figuring out which one we're going to use. From there, not only are we trying to improve the content that we're using, but we also want to improve its role in everything. One of the things that's really important to us is unifying the warning and crit package across all manufacturers. The dialogue that's used there, the visual representation, the sound effects representation, all those three things come together to really put together a complete experience for how you would experience a warning and a crit, how they should operate and how you would expect them to. And a lot of it, we really want to look toward the military and actual fighter jets, because there's a lot of science that goes into these kinds of warnings and alerts. And we would like to treat it a bit more real-world with that and get involved in it a bit more. I mean, still really cool, but that is a huge passion project for us, to really achieve a much better ship computer in that kind of sense. And that's just one role, definitely fixing and unifying that specific experience. But we would like to look at having a better ship computer that acknowledges the essence of the manufacturer, or the luxury, or the military, or the utilitarian. We want it to have that heart and to really share that a bit better. But also one extra thing is that I personally would like to have some more ship computer roles relating to gameplay loops. I feel like it'd be great to have a ship computer for exploration that can really touch on the systems and give you more information and thoughts and dangers and lurkings and all these things about your exploration. Or maybe a ship computer voice that's more detailed for combat, to give you an idea like, danger, Will Robinson, you're heading into a dangerous system, or you're outnumbered, there's a lot of ships approaching, and it's to a point where we sense that you're not going to be able to succeed. But these ideas are in our heads. We're really trying to put them down on paper. And, like I said, it really takes getting the right tech first. But all these things are on the table, and none of them have been fully signed off yet. But what we're clearly seeing is that the ship computer currently does not fulfill the role that we would like to see it fulfill. And so very much we will be addressing this as we sort out that tech.
TL;DRBuilt-in voice control would be nice, and they'd like voice interaction with NPCs too, but it's a big undertaking that sits well down the list behind other audio work.
Oh, for sure. Correct me if I'm wrong, I can't remember, this was quite a few years ago, but I thought there already exist a couple of third-party systems that you can use for our ships. The tech is there. It's just doing that tech internally for ourselves; that's another big undertaking. But I would like to go one step further. One of the big things that I really would like to see with voice is that your voice interacts with the NPCs, not only in your ship, but if you're on the ground and you're walking through a location, you can walk up to an NPC and say hi, and they will say hi back to you, because it registered that you greeted them and they can greet you back. Or simply, you have the inner thought responses, and instead of having to click on one, you can just say one of the responses and the NPC will acknowledge that. How cool would that be? That's my passion. I would like something like that at some point. But it is quite a big undertaking for the tech that we would need in there. And as you can see, Graham has quite a few big things on his plate already with Claudius and propagation and whatnot.
It would be some way down the list, but it's like climbing a mountain, isn't it? We just carry on. At some point we reach the peak, and maybe the peak is having AI that understands your speaking and understands what you're trying to express.
Yeah, we already have some stuff in place. So steam will come out, and sparks and things like that, and we have audio support for that. But yeah, absolutely, we should definitely look into things like alarms. That's something we'd really love to do.
Yeah, I'm sure we can look into that, add a little breath. I think quite often the breaths and silence in between are important, I would have to say. Transitional, and just giving the listener a break, I think that's valuable. It's a warranted request, although we do love our music. And there are locations, too, that we're considering having a bit more ambient stuff in, where it's not full-on melodies and whatnot. You can give yourself a break there as well and go to Pyro or something.
TL;DRThe hardest part is that audio designers juggle several different tools, which Claudius should centralize, while character dialogue triggered by AI and Subsumption remains largely out of the audio team's hands and needs more people.
In a way, a lot of it can be quite challenging just due to the multitude of tools we have. So this is something Claudius is really going to help with, where we centralize all of that. But at the minute, an audio designer can be jumping between maybe three or four different programs to get sound working. So that's one of the harder bits of it.
I definitely relate with Jack. Especially for dialogue, it's actually going to be a little harder because, unfortunately, Claudius will help with a lot of the non-character improvements, I'll be honest. But character dialogue does come from AI and it does come from Subsumption. And a lot of that is a bit out of our hands at the moment. Getting more support and getting more people from the dialogue team involved in that will really help us. Sadly, a lot of dialogue is out of our hands in how it triggers, because it's triggered by the AI and by Subsumption and things like that. It's just getting into that black box for our department, to really help with it and to expand on it. That just takes more people. If you want to join the dialogue team...
TL;DRThe devs say the tech for ship-wide announcements and a captain-triggered alert is close and not a huge leap, but it needs substantial markup, design work and backlog time, and a player-driven version is not what's coming in the next patch.
Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with getting that situation to really occur and give us enough game data to make that happen. I think right now a ship's life is rather binary. You're alive or dead. And there's a lot of plans in there to have a lot of components take damage and failure, leading you to have an imminent death where you have X amount of time to really have this drama unfold. And in order for us to really gain on that kind of ship computer use case, we really need to have that drama happen for us. But also, especially for a ship-wide announcement like that, the bigger side of it is to have, and we've talked about this before too, that system within your ship so that you can hear these ship-wide announcements from anywhere in the ship. And we're getting closer to that. Actually, we have that tech at its base core working right now and we're using it in [...]. So it is something that's happening, but to get it to the point of having it in all of our ships, that's going to take a lot of backlog work and things like that. Plus, the tech is also in its early stages. Early days, so we are getting there. That is a vision. And I do like the idea this kind of question poses, where the captain can kind of trigger that use case as well, just like battle stations. I mean, how would you really determine that other than the captain saying, "We think this is a battle stations scenario, so I'm going to trigger that as the captain"? And I think that's a pretty cool idea. I'd like to make that happen as a user myself. I think that's pretty cool.
Yeah, I was just going to say, because everything we do is systemic. So from a tech side, we have a systemic VoIP system where people communicate with each other. We have a tannoy system that, although we haven't marked it up in all the ships, is proven to be working. And we have a ship-wide audio channel for the VoIP for communication. So it's not a massive leap to then say, let's stick a microphone on the captain's seat and then give you a button you can press and then you can talk to the tannoy system. Because everything's systemic, there's not a great deal of work involved in doing that from a tech perspective. There is a huge amount of markup required in terms of making sure that the tannoy reaches every extent of the ship and things like that. So yeah, it's a great idea. I love the idea. And if you're talking about having a player drive it, a player sets the alert state and a player talks to the rest of the ship, then yeah, it doesn't sound like a huge leap from where we are right now in terms of tech, but obviously we'd have a huge amount of design and work to follow up with.
And I do want to follow up. When Bob said that some part of it's coming in the next patch, he's not talking about the player-implemented part. It's a part that we're using that we're not going to tell you about yet. Discover it yourself.
TL;DRThe devs say they want NPC radio chatter and a sense of life around landing zones and it is on the roadmap, but it needs a lot of recorded content and will take time.
Yeah, I mean, I've had chats with Dave about this a few times, and I think this might have even come up in previous Q&As, but the idea is definitely that we want to have that, like a pilot has in a typical aircraft, where they get other chatter on an open channel. And that concept is something that we really would like to have for Star Citizen as well. I mean, the main thing that really holds up something like that is just pure content. To have conversations like that back and forth with many different actors, enough to make a feature like that very interesting, takes a lot of recording time. So it's something that's going to take a bit of time to get into, but it is on our roadmap. It is something that we really want to achieve, especially for interactions with the ATC and having people kind of overhear other people parking and things like that. We want that kind of feeling of life going on around the landing zones. And that's really important to us. That life element is, in general, really something that we're putting a lot of focus on as of late.
One cool little thing I was speaking to Darren, the audio director, about is, in the future, looking to go through jump gates and wormholes and that kind of travel. It would be really cool if we could, with permission, record the VoIP input of any player and then play that back whilst they're in these altered states traveling through wormholes, as if it's warping the reality of time and space. There's many hoops to jump through before we even start exploring that, but I think it'd be really cool to hear back some comms, all processed, reversed and stuff, just to give that ethereal feeling as you're traveling interstellar through this medium.
TL;DRThe devs say they want a dynamic background crowd-chatter system that reacts to population and mood, and are trying to build systemic tools for it, but it is complex, content-heavy and still needs a lot of work.
Yeah. Well, the indiscernible dialogue that that kind of question really alludes to is walla. But in general, liveliness kind of comes from having lots of layers. You have a background and a foreground and a middle ground, or even more than just those three layers, for dialogue. And it's a little bit more complicated than you might think. In general, the walla, as it would sit, is a very static looping bed. And it doesn't really do much to help sell when the population of a room changes, if it grows or decreases, or if the mood changes, or if the player has an impact on the mood and pulls out a gun in a crowd and starts firing. Don't do that. But if that were to happen, the crowd would change, and you would want to hear that. It's quite a more impactful system. And we actually have a real goal to achieve this. We want to do a dynamic walla system that actually accounts for players coming and going, the size of the population, even the economic status of what the population would be, or their mood, and how things change like that. And that's something that's really heavy on our radar. But that's just the walla, that's just the background. We have the foreground, which I think they're also alluding to in this question, of actually seeing players having a conversation. And a lot of that is very dependent on behavior, AI behavior. And again, alluding back to what I said before about conversation trees and that chatter, that's a lot of content with a lot of actors. But mainly it depends on behavior and acknowledging those two characters, acknowledging that they're in a shared conversation. That one person said this topic, and now I need to comment on something that makes sense from that topic, and then they want to rebut after that, and you want to have at least a three-way back and forth of a conversation. And that takes a lot of effort, and it's a lot more complex than you might think. And then that again is just the foreground. Then you have the background needing its system and the foreground needing its system, and then, well, what do you do about gluing those two together? And this is something that we've been really trying to achieve more recently, because it's like a filmic kind of thing where you're trying to showcase sound unseen. So we don't really want to allude that there are people actually talking right there with you or whatnot, but we want to hear that there are conversations going on about you that aren't part of that static bed. And so we kind of have this: it doesn't call out to you, but it doesn't wash away. It just adds some pepper and some spice to what would otherwise be a static, bland bed. And that's what you've seen in the cargo and refinery decks. You're going to see it in our new location for Orison. We're trying to achieve a bit more of that. And that's going to help glue some of the stuff together while we still really need to put a lot of effort into these systems that are a bit more complicated than you might think. But it's definitely heavy on our minds right now, because that's a big thing for us, feeling that life in a space. Even if we don't have the tech or ability yet to do that, we want to try to achieve it in any way that we can, even in the interim. So we're doing our best.
Yeah, just to add on the end of that, the reason these things take time is because we try to do everything systemically. We try to solve the problem for the whole picture rather than solving specific cases by adding beds that suit this particular area. And that would mean that when the tech's not ready yet, certain areas, like you mentioned in the question, can feel a little bit like they're lacking some life and some colour. But what we're looking to do to solve that is not to just artificially throw that life and colour in, but throw in a system that allows us to colour whatever space it might be. So it's not just about walla, it's not even just about characters. It might be that you can walk into a room full of, say, hospital beds, and we could have a system that allows us to recognise that there's a lot of hospital beds in this room and gives it that kind of calm audio background that a hospital room has, because it's found all these objects in it. This kind of idea. So we're looking to make a system that basically allows us to colour every part of the universe.
And again, looking at that big picture of content, we try to get a little bit at a time. We're getting this content that's going to take a long time to get. We are getting a little bit at a time, and it just takes a lot of time to get those kind of big dialogue trees going.
TL;DRPhil Peers-Smallwood says creature sound work is at the early-concept stage, likely starting with the Orison space whale, with nothing concrete yet and the sound depending on what behaviors and gameplay the creatures end up having.
So that's me. We've got early concepts that we're looking at, but we've not really dug into it yet. I think the first one is going to be the space whale in and around Orison, right? So that's going to be really interesting, because it will be a big collaboration between sound design and dialogue design and code, because we're like, we need this to make a sound, can you build this implementation so we can hook into it? And then speaking with Bob, it's like, what is our baseline for creature sounds? How big are they going to be? What are they going to sound like? And then just start building some mock-ups and then refining it. So yeah, early days, but nothing concrete yet.
It's also important to acknowledge the behaviors of what these creatures can do, because then you have a mixture of different kinds of things: can they eat? Can they attack you? Are they going to be sleeping or quiet? It's really about capturing that essence in their emotion, the different things that they can do. I'm not sure what the Orison whales can do other than looking really pretty. I don't know. But as we expand, especially expand on the fauna, that is kind of the biggest thing: looking at all the different things they can do and making them really feel like a real living creature.
It's a really good point about the behavior, because you almost have to establish a language, right? Can it sound angry? Can it sound sad? Can it sound happy? Can it sound aggressive? Are there any gameplay cues that we need to support? Like, it's about to attack you. What's that gameplay loop? Will they make certain attack calls before they come after you or something? Or if it's a hunting mechanic, I'm not saying there is one, but how do we respond to that with sound? We really need to understand what the whole gameplay loop requirement is of said fauna.
TL;DRPyro's more turbulent look calls for its own dangerous, foreboding sound style guide, and the main challenge is making Pyro feel distinct from Stanton everywhere, with music also seen as important to that feel.
I can take it from a sound design aesthetic point of view. So Pyro's palette is massively different visually to Stanton. It's a lot more turbulent. And with that are going to come unique challenges. The planets are going to be different, the moons are going to be different, have a completely different vibe. If you've got a Stanton palette and you've got a Pyro palette, they're in themselves their own beasts. And then you establish: what does Stanton feel like? What does it embody? What do you want it to sound like? And then the same with Pyro. And then filter that down, similar to the ship thing, right? You build a style guide of what you want Pyro to sound like, dangerous and foreboding, and then how do we filter that down and realize that on this particular planet or that particular planet, and then take some specifics from each of those. It's going to be a load of fun, because there's quite a lot to work with, and we've learned a lot working on Stanton. So the Pyro stuff is really nice to get our teeth into. But it's new, uncharted territory. The tech and tools have improved and grown in scope since I started on the project and working on Stanton. I think the actual ability to put sounds in and tailor them to the experience is much improved. We have a great deal of fidelity. But I think the main challenge is really having that feel, a shift between Stanton and Pyro. So when you're in Pyro, anywhere in Pyro, space traversal or actually on a planet, you feel like you're in that system versus Stanton. So hopefully we can achieve that.
I wanted to add too that there's a discipline here that's kind of missing some representation. Music, I think, will have a really big impact on selling the emotional aspect of where we are, either Stanton or Pyro. And that's a very critical element, I think, when feeling out a different space. In a lot of cases, the way music affects you in that kind of sense is meant to not be very obvious.