TL;DRThey want to look into better directional combat audio, expecting sound propagation to help in some cases but make it harder in others, such as resonance inside ships, so options may be needed.
Yeah, I was just going to say, it's definitely something we want to look into for sure. It's probably something that, when propagation comes online, is likely to become easier at that point. But that's still tech Graham's working on, so you could probably take over from there.
It is an interesting question actually, because although the propagation tech will improve understanding of direction in some situations, it can also make it more difficult in others. Because if you're in ship combat and you're in first person, so your view is within the ship, a lot of what you might hear may be resonance from the outside of the ship, which is a little bit less easy to locate. So maybe we need to be offering options there, but it's all stuff that we look into once we have a fully working propagation system. But I would expect that sound to propagate partially directly, but also there'll be a lot of diffusion around it as well.
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.
Yes, it's something we definitely want to look into. It should be fairly simple in practice. We just need to assign a sound to each component and then tie that into a value to say how much health it has. So to echo what Graham said earlier, it's just a case of time and resources. But yeah, something we'd absolutely like to do.
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.
Once again, at risk of repeating what I've already said, it's a time and resources thing. Just due to the amount of ships we're working on, we have a system set up already that works. But looking into tying up the startup and shutdown sounds to the engine is something we need to look into, and it will take a lot of time. So yeah, it's something hopefully for the future.
I think another thing is some of the tech we're working on is going to make it easier for you guys to hook into the state of the ship at the point where it shuts down.
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.
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...