Graham Philipson

They are there. They are going to come back, but they're going to come back with a little bit more enthusiasm in the future. I really want them to vibrate, I want you to feel them go overhead. They are going to come back. Over to Graham on where they are now and where they will be in the future.

Yeah, so there's been a period of transition, I guess, on some of the sounds that we've been working on, and things aren't exactly where we want them to be. We've seen the videos you're talking about, and we know how good things were then, and we absolutely want to bring that back. We've had meetings about it just this morning and yesterday, and we're making it a priority to bring those back.

Well, community, they are coming back, but slightly better than they are at the moment. All the sounds are there in our Wwise project. It's just there have been some back-end changes.

I was going to say, what happened? Why did they disappear?

Well, sometimes, the project's always evolving. So the kind of hooks that our audio systems rely on can change. And depending on how much resources we've got and time, sometimes we have to prioritise newer content or different things. But now we're building the team to be able to get back to all of that good stuff and make sure that we don't lose any part of the experience and just make it better.

So we didn't intentionally take them out? Some other aspect of the game grew, a bug happened, we haven't been able to address it?

There's been a gradual shrinking of how big the ship sounds are in order to make the game performant, but now we're reworking that so they can be performant and you can hear them a long way away as well.

Yeah, so we demonstrated realistic audio mode some time ago. Yeah, I know. The problem we have is that the game is huge and we have to treat every single sound in the game with realistic mode in order to be certain that we're giving you the experience we want you to experience. Plus, game development is difficult. Scheduling is probably the most difficult part of game development. So we're working on getting all that work into the schedule. It's not there right now. We have ships to deal with. We have ship flybys right now. Beyond that, we're going to be looking at moving all that stuff over to realistic mode and it will be within your hands at some point. I don't want to start promising dates though.

No, no promising. And the remit of what I want to bring to it as well. So I've got a whole sack of stuff that I want to bring to the game. It's a big sack of sonic delights. But it's going to come. Sometimes things go missing. We're in dev. I don't know how many sounds I looked at. There's over 700,000 sounds in the game already, and we're going to be bringing more to them, and we're polishing it all the time.

Yes, we will. We're going to elevate all of the sounds in the ships, particularly on the console, UI and things like that. You will absolutely get that kind of stuff. Basically, I'm going to be elevating the experience in all vehicles and ships. They're going to have much more personality and much more presence.

And one thing we want to bring as well with Star Audio is that we make it much easier for the sounds on the ship to be aware of what's happening to the ship itself. So something like damage to the ship's power systems would cause things like light sounds to dip a little bit, and ambiences maybe to drop, and things like this. And you would feel the impact no matter where you are on the ship.

Historically, a lot of the damage state stuff is tied to VFX and binary things that are being triggered. We'd really want to properly flesh out the damage states for ships so you'd be able to hear things not working quite as well as you want.

Got to have it. As it stands, the VoIP system is creaking a little bit under the pressure of how heavily we've pushed the player cap on our servers. So we need to do some rework there. But I think this goes back to the ship horns question as well, because we've talked in the past about being able to make announcements outside of the ship. So you could approach some other players on a planet surface and you could just switch on the mic and just let them know that they're in some trouble or whatever. You do all that kind of thing. And this is all built into the design of VoIP, but we need some back-end work too.

Also, we will be introducing an element of vibration to the ship. So whenever there's damage, you will feel it as well as hear it, as well as an audible signal or an alarm system. So there will be all sensors aware.

So what needs to happen is a rework of the back end so that it can handle these hugely elevated player counts. We also want to be able to communicate cross-shard, so it basically needs to become completely independent of servers and shards, and it needs to be running in its own back end entirely, so that anyone can communicate with anyone. That is all work that I'm not going to be part of and not familiar with. So it's very much, as I say, our team in Canada. But once they've done that, then the hookup on the game side is not much different to how it is now. So as you know, when it works, you're able to communicate with each other, but it is inconsistent, and it's inconsistent because of this back-end issue.

It was struggling before the advent of server meshing. When server meshing came out, it's not quite the bullet in the head of Old Yeller, but it's really exacerbated the issue. Benoit is due to come back on in a couple weeks and do a big update to that show we did in February where we talk about all the technical features, and we'll have an update on the work for VoIP and FOIP there.

It's a combination of the two. So there are some issues where we've made some changes to the flight model and we haven't got around all the ships yet to make them all respond correctly to that flight model change. But it's all part of development. But also, as part of that update for those flight models, we want to be doing a pass across the whole ship and giving them a nice refresh as well, because some of them are like eight, nine years old.

Yeah, I'm going to add to this. I'm doubling the department in order to give a fantastic experience. I've been given the opportunity to increase the department in order to turn this around. The vehicles is the most important thing for me. That's the thing that's going to get the most focus. And just feeding into what you've just said, yes, everything's going to get better. To another stage, it's going to be elevated. The whole flight experience and the whole vehicle experience is going to be what you want and what I want. And I'm not going to let anything get out there until it sounds, can I say, shit hot? Very excited. So, yes, I'm sorry things sometimes don't make a sound, but hey, they're going to be making a sound. It's not a deliberate thing. We've got a lot to do. It's a very, very, very deep game.

We've got so much respect for the community, and it hurts us when things break. As Graham said, the first ships were, I believe, about 10 years ago, nine years ago. And the ship systems we've built were built for the game at the time. And if you think how fast Star Citizen has come and the different flight models we've had and all the changes, we've not been able to keep pace with that and keep the legacy ships up to date. But working with Simon, we're actually building the team out to be able to have the resources to do that. Not just the new ships; it's making sure we're working on all the legacy ships, all the ships that are dearest to the heart. Like the Drake Cutlass should never ever sound bad, because we know that's really popular. But we understand that a lot of the ships have fallen below the bar that we've set and the bar that it deserves to be. And we're working hard to rectify it.

It's actually the opposite.

So the first thing is to analyse what is the legacy stuff and divide it into certain categories. For me, the priority is vehicles, so I have to analyse all the vehicles, the ships, etc. Then we've got creatures, we've got Foley, which I'm sure everyone knows what is. Excuse me if I'm teaching you to suck eggs: which is the feet. Right down to the surfaces and the soles, I'll be analysing all of the stuff. We will be analysing weapons; we're going to update all the weapons, ambiences, the ambient systems, the rain systems, what happens on planets, the flora and fauna, analysing all, plus building on top of that. So it's breaking it down into its component parts: the music, the diegetic music, how we're going to elevate the music more within the game and how it's going to react with all of the greater content that we're going to produce. It's as if you're coming to a meal and I'm trying to pick at the little bits: right, that's got to change, and that course has got to be changed. No, let's not offer that salad anymore. Let's push that one away. Let's have something fresh. So it's breaking it down and analysing each thing. And then the stages of the arc of the way I want to achieve towards version one, we're in alpha obviously, is: right, I want to do that first. This is the most important thing. And I want to do this. So the first thing is vehicles, like I said. And that will feed into the next areas I want to focus on. That doesn't mean those areas are going to be neglected, because I'm going to have a department that's going to be focusing on all of it. But I need to prioritize stuff. And the way I prioritize stuff is going to be influenced by what is needed at CIG, but also what the community are upset about. I'm kind of not interested to hear about the stuff that's good. I really need to react to the stuff that people are disappointed with. And then I can get a better game, really. I know what's good. So don't tell me what's good.

And to expand on that, and something you touched on, Jared, is because we're able to now increase the team, we'll be building the team to be able to look at early concept work. So getting in early doors with new features, content, mechanics and whatnot. We'll have people be able to focus on the here and now: what is the current release, seeing that through. And have the people then to go off and look at all the legacy content and actually do all those backlog fixes. We're very fortunate as a department to be in a period of growth and to be able to facilitate that. Whereas in the past, we may have had the resources just to focus on the here and now and not address the backlog or not jump on the things earlier on.

And one thing I'd like to say is that the backlog is fun, right? Because there's nothing a sound designer likes more than working on a finished product. There's all these ships that are ready to go that sound designers would absolutely love to get their hands on, given time in the schedule, to make them sound amazing.

To some extent, yeah. We have to respond to changes in the visuals, absolutely. And we don't always have time to respond to them in the schedule that it's happening in for the visual teams. That's why we're lucky we're a live product, because we've always got another release further down the line where we can make these changes. But I think that for us, we can't schedule exactly in line with VFX, because VFX are only one element of the game that needs sound treatment. And there are so many other elements that are all asking for the same support at the same time.

But ship weapons is also another key area of focus for us. We're really focusing on the ship experience, and ship weapons is a key part of that. And we're building out resources to elevate all the ship weapons for the ships, so it's a much better experience.

It might be easier to list the overlaps, because they're very different things. So Star Audio is effectively a kind of middleware replacement. It's not going to replace Wwise, which we will always use, at least for the time being, to play back our sounds, but it's a replacement for the glue between game systems and the audio system that then allows a lot more freedom to sound designers to do whatever they want. So where existing ways of hooking sounds up to things are quite prescriptive, you might look at an animation and say, I want this animation to play this exact sound from the library. What Star Audio does is it allows you to basically just flag the fact that the animation is played and leave the decision on what the sound does down to the sound designer, and they can then make that contextual if they want. They can add logic, they can do all kinds of different things. We can also do things like passing events down hierarchies at runtime. So I always use this example, but if somebody's holding a weapon on the hip and they're piloting a ship and the ship gets hit by a missile, we can make the gun on the hip rattle because the ship got hit, because there's a hierarchy that's being tracked at runtime, which we never had before with the old systems. So there's a lot more contextual information available to all the sounds. And the realistic mode is kind of a subset of that, a microcosm of that whole ecosystem, which is basically listening to whether there's any audio pressure between the listening device of the ears and the sound emission device, which may be a ship or a weapon or whatever. So the realistic mode is a sort of first use of what Star Audio does, or it's a high use of what Star Audio does. But it's got much more aesthetic presence, I think, to the player, which is why I think it's something that people are very interested in. But Star Audio is the tech behind that thing.

It's hugely important, sorry.

Go home and slam your kitchen door and listen to what happens to all the stuff on your shelves and in your cutlery drawer and all that kind of thing. That's the experience we're going for. And I know that's just a small example of it, but it should be exactly the same. If your ship gets hit by anything, or if it gets a force upon it, which may be gravity, it may be extreme G from performing a maneuver, you want all these things to be straining, every single part; maybe parts that aren't intended to move, but definitely the parts that are as well.

Yeah, it's a complicated thing to achieve, and we're thinking about it all the time. It's not just the case of just adding metal rattling or a bit of low-frequency vibration. We want to bring more to it. We're considering haptic stuff as well. We want to really consider it from now and build for the future. It's not just a case of noise, it's beyond that. And like Graham says, everything in life has vibration attached to it, because a sound wave moves objects in different ways, and the reflections of those objects affect us in all manner of ways. And we want to bring that experience.

I think a big part of it is action and reaction. We can do all the cool sound design in the world and put it in the game, but it would only really give you so much level of immersion. It's more about how does that sound propagate in the 3D space and how does that affect everything else? So this inheritance system allows impulses to be passed from an event to everything that's connected and have that all have appropriate vibrations, down to the tightest ones to the big flappy vibration stuff. That's your big immersion silver bullet.

It's going to affect everything. It's almost like a force that surrounds us in the universe that we can't see. Pardon, it's stealing from another title. But fundamentally, that's going to affect the way we perceive the audio, this vibration system, and coining it as a vibration system is almost a slight.

It's almost limiting, yeah, because what we're actually building is a resonance system. And it's not just about making things vibrate because of the things that they're physically connected to. If we go back to the example we talked about right at the beginning, where we've got ship flyovers, there's a heck of a lot of force coming off that thing. And if you've got anything on the ground that can rattle as that thing flies over, we're going to make it rattle.

But it would be awesome, we do agree. Gosh, that's more complicated than these questions would suggest. Because when you come away from a large area of noise like a cityscape, what do we want to hear if we're traveling around it? Do we want to hear the sirens? There's so much different propagation, echo and reverb going on there, without it sounding like mush or just noise. It's an interesting consideration. And of course we would consider it, because when you pull away from a cityscape, you need a sound. But actually how we focus on that is complicated, because we would deal with it in a linear way differently than we would in an immersive way in a game. So I haven't really thought about this yet.

It's almost where you tackle it like LODs. So when you're at zero point, when you're in the point of interest like Area18 or Lorville, a lot of the stuff you'll hear is bespoke and discrete. It's coming from 3D emitters or volumes we put down there, or it's attached to a ship that's flying by. So everything's kind of the space of what you can see, hear and feel. And then when you're at mid distance, we can take that and put in designed content that is like a consolidation of that, and then scale it to what it would sound like at distance. Graham's worked on grouping systems and stuff where, if you've got three sound sources, it will know they are the same brush or the same sound source, group them together and then switch to a group sound of that rather than three discrete sources. So we can leverage technology like that.

Yeah, so one of the features in Star Audio is this ability to basically convert a sound that's too far away from you to be heard into a statistic that feeds into another sound. So if you think of the city, then you might have lots of vehicles moving around in there, like you say, sirens going off, these kinds of things. And we can use those statistics without playing all those sounds and creating cacophony. We can use them to decide what sound we should play in their place.

Yeah, because we have to make choices. It's not just a case of, when you pull away from an environment, we're going to just roll off the top end and give you reverb and make it mushy-sounding. We've got to actually pinpoint which are the POIs which you'd want to be sustained aurally out of that environment. And then we'd have to respond to stuff that's giving lights or movement. It's difficult. It's an interesting question, because the challenge is quite difficult.

Tie into time of day and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, well, we'll talk a little bit later about how Corentin's going to be looking at the flight experience from an audio perspective, and this is another angle on that, and we have to make the ships work in a way that sounds good in all circumstances, and this is a very unique circumstance, but it looks absolutely beautiful, and I certainly can't wait till we get our hands on it and start tuning the audio experience to it as well.

I do agree, it's going to be a really cool piece of work to work on.

What's important to mention also is these tracks, you'll be able to race them at night also. We have amazing lighting artists that did some amazing work on these tracks. So whether you're racing at daytime or nighttime, the experience is going to be different, but I love to see these tracks, the way they're lit up at night, especially the landmark on this one with the fire on top, it looks great. One other thing to know is we did hide some Easter eggs. Some are going to be easy to find, others are going to be harder to find because the tracks are so big. We did place a few podiums around the tracks in key locations where we have some nice shots for print screens. So it's going to be up to the players to find those podiums. There's between one and three podiums hidden per track. So good luck finding them.