Kit Chalice

They're not gone. No, they're not gone. They're just mixed differently. They never went away. I've seen the video that people always show, they're like, when are these ones coming back? I've seen that video around, and those sounds are actually still in there. They're just mixed differently. But the difference is, back then, we didn't really play anything in the build-up to the pass-by sound. And it was just, the ship would go overhead, and then the pass-by one-shot we play in isolation. Now we play a lot more stuff on the approach for distant ships and atmosphere, all this kind of stuff. So I guess the problem is that I'm not saying we haven't lost something in this transition, but I think we just need to mix it better so that when there is a ship flying directly overhead, you do still get that same experience that you used to. But I think from a gameplay point of view, it's better at the moment because you can actually tell where a distant ship is and if it's coming towards you or not. Whereas before that was a lot harder.

Because it was overwhelming before. Yeah, there's a bit of a cinematic element that's maybe been lost slightly because we're trying to tell the player more about what's happening in the ships in the area. But yeah, it's always that balance between the two.

So would you say it's something worth looking into without committing to one action one way or the other? Because even just looking in the chat right now, there are some folks who like it, and it's an improvement, and there are some folks who are like, no, we want the old sounds back. So you're knowing there's no way to please all people all the time. Is this something worth at least taking a look at?

It should be possible to get both. It should be possible with the proper mix and the proper ducking of things and the context, we should be able to get it so that if it is one of those situations where it's directly overhead and really close, you do get the old experience, but in the situations that benefit from what we were talking about, where you can hear them more clearly at distance and that kind of thing, then we can have that. It should be possible.

I've spent half the day banging my head against the table trying to get this to work properly.

A lot of what we do is built on all of the tech in the game. So as a starting point, somebody's designed a ship and there are a lot of systems that all hang together to make that ship reliable. And then our system kind of sits on the end, kind of representing all those systems in audio form. And very often there are certain little angles here and there that need to be dealt with that aren't so noticeable from any other point of view than audio, because as long as the ship moves when you press go, it's cool, right? From an audio perspective, we don't always get the messages we want, so we end up digging into the code and finding out where those messages have gone. With these systems, we're looking to improve all of this stuff. Again, the mix thing comes into it as well. I think we've got a lot of tech in the pipeline to improve the ability to mix based on events, which is something we don't really have right now. That's quite a long way down the schedule, but it's going to come eventually and we're going to have a lot more ability to do more emergent things with the mix, because it's one thing providing the sound for the spaceship starting up, but it's another thing being able to make that take center stage. Additionally to that, we're also looking to improve the way that sounds transfer from physical media that maybe isn't necessarily air. So if you fire up some loud thrusters on the outside of a ship, you want to hear a lot of metal rattles and things like that. And we have systems designed but not yet developed to allow that.

Yes, we'll improve them at some point. We did a rework of them like a year ago, I think. That improved them quite a lot, but there's definitely still a lot of work to do. And I think there's a few bugs in there as well. That means we're not getting the sounds of other people entering and exiting quantum travel, which obviously is something really cool and something you want. It's quite an interesting challenge with our QT mechanic because they mentioned Star Wars and Star Trek. The Star Trek warp jump is like the ship's stationary and it's an instant into the warp bubble. Same with the Star Wars hyperspace jump, it's pretty much ship's stationary or moving at the speed it was and then space starts to distort and you're in, whereas ours there's a long sort of ramp-up where the ship's going very fast but isn't yet in the tunnel. It needs a bit of a different treatment.

I'll hold my hand up here and say, the quantum travel exit sound, I've got a bug on me for that. So hopefully that'll be improved soon once I've fixed that bug.

It also points out, it's similar to the ship startup sounds. There's the problems with the different perspectives that people have on the ships. Are you in the ship coming out of quantum travel? Are you on a space station while another ship comes in off quantum travel to where you are? And then what if 50 ships all exit quantum travel around you in the same place at the same time? There's systems that we need to deal with, things like that.

So we have talked about this previously and there are a few barriers to this. Mach 1 is different depending on atmospheric pressures and the type of planet that you're on. It opens up a lot of questions, but the biggest issue that it opens up is the question of whether you simulate the speed of sound. As in, when you see an explosion in the distance, do you hear it seconds later? Which apparently isn't the case. And it isn't the case because for gameplay reasons, it's much more important that you know what's going on actually now. And this is, again, the important thing is that it's fun to play. There is a little bit of vary there. If you go down the route of talking about sonic booms, that implies that there is a speed of sound representation too. But that's not necessarily the case, I guess. We could say at a certain speed, as a function of what the atmospheric density is, we could maybe provide a sonic boom sound in atmosphere. We haven't done it yet, but because it comes up so often, I think we would definitely consider it. What was the phrase? We will consider planning to think about it.

It is the question that comes up every single time we do a show with the audio team. It is the most consistent question; it has been there in the first episode, it will be there in the last episode until it actually happens. It's very much a community-desired effect, but I'm just going to paraphrase every version of the answer that we've gotten over the years. The biggest thing, as you said, was the atmospheric density. It's different on every planet. It's still being developed in every planet. They're still being adjusted. The speeds of the craft are still being adjusted. Folks are about to learn about all the atmospheric flight changes coming in Alpha 3.10, with changes to speeds and stuff like that. There's so much that needs to be considered before we get there. I don't think there's anybody that doesn't want it. It's just a question of whether it's a reasonable amount of work or request at this point.

There's a major visual and physical effect it has as well. If thin plates of glass aren't smashing under the pressure wave and things like that, if trees aren't bending because of them, then it isn't just audio. There's an impulse thing going on as well.

If we're going to do it, we're going to do it. But yeah, I think the short answer is everybody here wants it just as much as the folks out there want it.

We don't work on this as much as we'd like lately, unfortunately, but it's definitely something we all want to do. I always think the coolest thing we could do would be you're in a dogfight and you can hear everything crystal clear, you can hear where all the enemy ships are, you can hear your ship, what it's doing, and then all of a sudden you take an unexpected huge hit and it happens to knock out your sound sim module and suddenly everything just folds down to just you in the little cockpit and you just hear everything that is in the cockpit or you're sat on, basically. And then after a few more seconds, it slowly comes back up and you're back to the full soundscape. But for that four or five seconds, it's just you in the little cockpit in space. That would just be the coolest thing. The sound of the ships now is pretty much what we'd imagine sound sim on to sound like. So everything and all the stuff to do with ship sounds and ship combat sounds is pretty much sound sim on at the moment. We still need to creatively decide what the creative direction is for sound sim off. How far do we take it? What should it sound like? And then, to be honest, that's kind of the biggest barrier at the moment.

And then, of course, it needs to be physicalized into a component, which is actually something on the vehicle team. And then those game systems attach to that and then make it puncturable, damageable through external stuff.

There's game balancing considerations as well. We need to adjudicate how much the sound helps you in a dogfight. I hope it does. And then we need to make sure that the impact of having it disabled isn't so great that it actually is a serious disadvantage. Or maybe we want that. I don't know. But that needs to be taken into consideration as well.

It's similar to how accessibility is handled in computer games. You can have arrows telling you which direction certain sounds are coming from if people are deaf, but if you switch that on and you can hear, then it turns the audio off. So you can't have both. I think this is similar to that.

Yes, please.

5.1 and 7.1 are already [supported]. Spatial, it's really interesting and we're looking at it a lot. We need to work out exactly how we're going to use it, because the height channels, are we going to use them all the time or are we only going to use them in certain contexts when we want the height there? Obviously, without the height channels, you should still know to a certain degree whether it's coming from above you or below you. So things like spatial sound are going to help with that, but it shouldn't be the only way of conveying that. But yeah, it is really exciting. And I'm more excited personally about spatial sound than I am going from stereo to surround.

Well, they used to sell surround as 3D audio, right? But it's not. It's a 2D plane. So now 3D audio is actually 3D for the first time. That's cool. But for our game, our game is six degrees of freedom. Up is wherever we want up to be, right? So being limited to a flat plane of audio speakers is a limiting factor for us. So we're absolutely looking at Atmos, because it will potentially do a lot for us. Not just Atmos, other 3D sound systems are available.

It is a hugely complicated thing to unravel, delivery formats and how you listen to spatial sound and how you author spatial sound.

Yeah, there's definitely a difference. In space, you've just got the sound of the, we call them ship-wide audio objects, like the sounds of the cockpit kind of whining and humming and all the thrusters on your ship. Actually, you've also got vibration in space, but you don't really hear that unless your ship's quite damaged. And then when you enter atmosphere, we bring in what we call environment feedback. So this is the sound of the air rushing over the frame of the ship. And that's reactive to how dense the atmosphere is, how fast the ship's going, all that kind of stuff. And the environment feedback also governs, if you're flying through a snowstorm, you should hear the hail on the windscreen. So we do have that, and if you're on the ground looking up at a ship flying in atmosphere, then it's also different. You get the sort of distant diffuse sound of the ship ripping through the air. If you hear a pass-by in space, it sounds a lot different, a lot more muffled. I think it really depends at the moment what ship you're flying in atmosphere as to how much difference you hear, because a lot of the ships that haven't had an audio pass in a long time have this kind of really, really broadband sound design aesthetic to them. Everything's really washy and covers the whole frequency spectrum. It doesn't leave much room for the slightly more simple sounds of wind and hail hitting the windscreen and stuff. But some of the ships we've given a pass recently, it caused quite a stir, the Cutlass Black, for us to redesign. And a few of the more modern ones like the Carrack and the Banu Defender, they have far less mid-frequency content in the actual ship sound, more bottom end and top end, which frees up the mids, so you hear a lot more of the vibration and all of the weather sound and wind sound against the ship. Hopefully that's the plan.

So it sounds like a lot of the sound design for the ships is individual to each ship. And what you're saying is that newer ships have newer tech, newer techniques, newer features, and maybe some of the older ones could probably stand to get a little more attention.

Yeah. It's just that we kind of figured out what works and what doesn't over time. And some ships, unfortunately, need to be revisited at some point.

It's like the phrase painting the Humber Bridge. You keep painting a bridge, you get to the other end, and when you finish painting it, you've got to go back to the other end and start again. The number of ships that we have.

That's an interesting question. I mean, honest answer, this is new ground for us. So I think concept artists do have the final say over what's going to happen to the concept. So we don't tend to input to that. And I think that makes sense because the visual really does drive what you think a creature is going to sound like.

It would be really interesting, though, to think about how a future space creature could vocalize, and whether there were any physiological specialities to it that mean maybe it's got a huge trumpet or something and it might sound trumpety.

Of course, being able to communicate in vacuum if it's the whale, or on a planet with thinner atmospheres like that. I do want to stress, this is obviously referring to the ISC that aired, I think it was a week ago now. We are at the beginning of developing this pipeline right now. Right now it is characters, but part of what's going to happen over the next several months and maybe even longer is that characters will get together with tech animation, we'll get together with the actor status team, we'll get together with all these other groups and figure out how to make them, because we do not have a pipeline for making creatures. We haven't made creatures yet. So we have to figure out what this new pipeline is and what we can take from the other pipelines that we've built and what needs to be created bespoke. Just on this, who makes the sounds? Does the sound of a creature fall under dialogue? Is that going to be Bob going out there and recording different animals to combine it? Or is it going to be the realm of a tech designer who's got to go out there and simulate something from scratch? Those are the kind of things that we still need to figure out as we build that pipeline up. Me, personally, I'm hoping that we send Bob into as many dangerous areas as possible with a microphone.

I would like to say, though, it does cover very similar ground when we consider behavior and how, as a dialogue team, we do chime back and work with design and narrative on the behavior templates and things like that. So I would like to think we would have at least some collaboration there to figure out what they would do, how they would go about their day, attacking, hunting, or just milling about. So those things really, the behavior and the sounds, those really go hand in hand. I would like to see that this becomes a collaboration just like it has been with dialogue.