TL;DRThe flyby sounds are still in the project and the team says they will return, even better, after back-end changes and shrinking ship sound sizes for performance, which they are now reworking.
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.
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.
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, we've basically been given a high-level mandate to get more dialogue into the game, make it more of a dialogue experience when you're doing missions, talking to ATCs, NPCs, all that kind of stuff. So we're working with the whole narrative department to get more dialogue content recorded on our wonderful PCAP stage, which is next door, and getting more of that stuff into the game to really flesh that stuff out.
Yeah. Well, like a mini, or something a bit more substantial? Like 'get out of my way'? Oh, gosh. Well, yes, this is something that's entirely possible. Making some kind of scary noise obviously would be terrific, with weight and gravity. So, yes, I haven't kind of considered it exactly. Well, that is a good question.
Yeah, I think I saw like war horns and stuff. I'm thinking now: it's a big capital ship, I want people to know I'm arriving. Like a 'braaam', something like that. That'd be epic. Kind of like the Reapers from Mass Effect or like the War of the Worlds stuff with Tom Cruise.
TL;DRYes, the team plans richer damaged-state audio, with ship sounds reacting to damage like power loss and being felt anywhere on the ship, moving beyond today's binary, VFX-tied triggers.
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.
TL;DRRain was scoped for one event but spread across the whole universe, so the team calls it an early version and will keep improving it for different surfaces, with a fuller dynamic weather system planned.
Yes. So this is a classic us thing. So we scoped the rain initially for Stormbreaker to support that event. And the way that we looked to implement it, it actually unintentionally scaled across the entire verse. Now, a rain system is huge. You need to make sure you've got all the different types of rain, you've got all the different types of surfaces, material types, material construction; like a metal barrel will sound very different to a metal canopy versus it being inside of a car. So we consider our rain system like version 0.5 and we will continue to work on it.
It's really complicated. Precipitation, like you're saying, we've got so many surfaces to consider, and also the speed of the rain, which angle it's going at, how intense it is and what it hits and how it hits stuff. And sometimes rain can sound like white noise and it's really a challenge trying to make precipitation sound good. And that's what we want to do. It's got to hit different surfaces. It's not as easy as you would think, and it gets in the way of things sometimes. The way we mix the rain and the way we're going to have to dip it down so we don't affect the music and the narrative challenges and anything else. It's very tricky to do that. We had to get the stuff out for Stormbreaker, because it was in the storm obviously, but it's going to be across the verse and it's going to hit lots of different areas in different ways.
I often say we have the same conversations the backers do, just several weeks earlier. When the first reviews for Stormbreaker came in, we were saying the same thing. It's like, we should be hearing it here. It should sound different when it hits this versus when it hits this. It's just time.
There's a full dynamic weather system planned and we'll be fully supporting that. This is going to be more limited, but it's limited but far-reaching. And now we need to backfill and sort it out.
TL;DRATC chatter is in its infancy, but the team wants much more of it, possibly including open-channel comms near points of interest, working with narrative to make it contextual.
Have we? Yes, we have. So it's in its infancy. We want to bring a lot more ATC into it. Obviously, this has narrative implications. So we're going to be working with Dave on this, obviously, to see what we can do to increase the amount of ATC. But I'm fascinated by ATC anyway. It's one of my things. So, yes, is the answer to that.
It's part of that mandate to get more dialogue into the game. It might not be direct dialogue. We might also be looking to add open comms, open-channel ATC, when you're near points of interest on planets or cities or points of interest in space, just to give life to what's happening and ideally have it contextual about what's going on.
You can put little nuggets in there. And it's a big part of the experience of being in a ship. When it moves, you get lots of ATC, if you've been inside the cabin of an airplane. There's stuff going on all the time, and we want to bring that real experience to the game.
TL;DRSilent ships are partly bugs and partly awaiting passes after flight model changes; the team is growing to refresh older ships and says it isn't deliberate, with no timeline given.
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.
TL;DRLegacy work won't be boring: the team will break legacy audio into categories, starting with vehicles and prioritising by company needs and community complaints, while a growing team also handles current and early work.
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.
TL;DRAudio partly has to follow visual changes but can't schedule in lockstep with VFX because many areas need support, though ship weapons are a focus and live releases allow later changes.
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.
TL;DRVibration is considered hugely important, and the team is building a broader resonance system where impulses propagate to connected and nearby objects, and is also considering haptics.
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.
TL;DRLarge-scale ambient city sound is agreed to be desirable but complicated; the team describes a distance-based approach using grouped sources and statistics from far-off sounds, and says it hasn't thought it through yet.
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.
Yeah, we need smarter ways to tie into that context. So you get the whole kind of brownout, whiteout, hovering experience, but in a way in which it's not paralyzing if loads of people decide to hover around where you are in an outpost or whatever, and it's just completely dominating. So we need to be smart about how we do it, but you absolutely want to hear the weight and presence of that above you. Plus the war horns.
Yeah, absolutely. So unfortunately, we were quite rushed on the jump point music design for that. Jump points was a whole thing. Ideally, the music experience should be for the ship and all the occupants inside that ship, because you're all experiencing that together. But I think at the time we had to tie it to: are you flying the ship?
I think a lot of the logic is associated with the ship pilot. And then anyone who is a passenger is actually a passenger, and metaphorically as well in this sense. And I think we just need to be able to figure out how to hook them into that.
I've got one. I've been here for so long. I've been very fortunate. I've had two beautiful children. Well, not me, my wife has. But I took the heartbeat from the pregnancy scans, and I put my eldest son on one of the hospital monitors in one of the hospitals. I'm not sure which location it's in. And then the younger baby, their heartbeat is on one of the other ones. So they live in the game, which is pretty cool.
TL;DRThe audio team asks the community to communicate with them, especially to report audio bugs they miss, such as a ship that stops making sound, through Spectrum or by mailed letter.
Tell us what you want. Communicate with me and us. You're going to get so much communication. I don't mind. I want communication. It's a two-way street. It's a two-way pipeline. So, yeah, communicate with us. Reach out to us. When I've got time, I'll want to engage with you. I don't want there to be non-engagement. I think engagement for me is a great creative tool. And my ears are no better than your ears. I want to hear what you're not hearing. I want to hear what you would like to hear. All of these things are valid creative observations. So reach out.
We're fundamentally making the game for the community, for the backers. As we're building the team, we're going to be putting more time into being on Spectrum and listening to what they like, what they don't like. But I would ask, please do shout about any audio issues that you come across, because a lot will swing past us and we won't catch them. Even our talented QA team won't catch them, because we can't test every context there is. But as soon as there is an issue, like a ship stops making a sound, if we've not caught it, please just shout about it and we'll get on to it.
We're not deliberately planting bugs. Bugs are an inevitability of development. We're in alpha. It's a deep game. We will fix things all the time. We're there to fix the bugs and make things better. We're not making you trip up deliberately, but obviously, like Phil says, reach out. We have a dedicated QA. We've got a department searching all the time to fix this stuff. And we're doing it.
Chat is asking, how do they reach out? So obviously Spectrum: post in Spectrum, the Ask a Dev threads, subforums. But I'm going to encourage you, because Simon doesn't know what he's getting into on his first show here, to send mailed letters to Simon Gershon, care of Cloud Imperium Games, 6 Goods Yard Street, Manchester, United Kingdom, M3 3BG. Send your letters. I will ensure that they get to his desk.
Yeah, but we're trying to get the flashing lights and everything on the police vehicles and the medical vehicles and whatever, but flashing lights only take us so far.
TL;DRPhil Peers-Smallwood says the team is exploring enabling spatialization in Wwise (allowing Dolby Atmos, DTS and similar) once they migrate to a newer version, while still watching surround support and working on simulated head-related audio cues.
Yeah, so spatialization is something we're currently exploring. So we're looking at enabling spatialization in Wwise, which will allow backers to make use of Dolby Atmos, DTS, Windows spatialization and stuff. The current version of Wwise that we're on doesn't permit that yet, but when we migrate to the new version of Wwise, then it's something we can continue to explore. But it's important to note that when we enable that, the Dolby Atmos, DTS and stuff, that's third-party software. So although we can enable the feature, it will be down to the backers to choose which versions they want to go with. People might just have aesthetic preferences for which spatialization tool they want to go with. But beyond that, we still have a keen ear on surround support. Now, it's been a bit challenging working from home, because we've all been working from home since March last year. And most of us are working in, some have spare bedrooms, I'm currently in my dining room and stuff. And we're doing our best to work and build the acoustic environment, have decent playback and stuff. But the practicality of it is we don't all have room for 5.1, 7.1 systems. So that is a shame, but it's something we still have a keen ear on. But also beyond that, so we've got spatialization we're looking into, keeping an ear on surround sound, but we're also having a focus on fake HRTF, which is a head-related transfer function. A couple of our really talented sound designers, like Fran Delpia and Adi Kelch, are really spearheading looking into attenuating sound based on the position of the emitter relative to the player. So what a head-related transfer function basically is: things sound different depending on where they are around you. If they're in front of you, behind you, above you, below you, the ear attenuates the sound slightly differently. And we're looking to, in simplistic ways, try and telegraph that to the player. So when you're in a dogfight, for instance, you can kind of hear the sound changing and you can learn that, hey, that's above me, that's below me, because we're not just dealing with a flat plane like an FPS, where things are in front of you or behind you or slightly above or slightly below. If you're in 3D space, in a dogfight in space, then everything could be on all axes at the same time. So yeah, we understand it's massively important for a game such as Star Citizen and S42. So it's definitely on our radar and we are looking into it.
Yeah, I mean, probably since the last time we spoke, we've upgraded the version of Wwise twice. Because we have the quarterly release window, we have a window that kind of intersects with that for actually doing things like this, where we want to make sure we've got enough testing time and make sure there's been no regression of issues in the middleware, things like this. So we always look for a big enough window for us to upgrade the Wwise version so as not to risk the quality of the next release. So yeah, I think we did upgrade Wwise in both of the previous releases, and we will be looking to upgrade it in the next one too.
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;DRPhil Peers-Smallwood explains that engine sounds are designed from the manufacturer's identity and the ship's role, via a style guide and layered, input-driven sounds tuned in Wwise, so each brand and ship category sounds appropriate.
Well, I'll take that one then. So what we'll do is we'll look at the manufacturer and see what the brief is about those. Are they aligned with military? Are they more aligned with alien tech? Are they cheaply made? Are they well made? Then we'll look at the ship specifically. Is it a fighter, a hauler? Is it meant to be focused on mining? Anything in particular to that? Then we'll have a creative kickoff and pull in references from other ships that we have and see where there's any parity and stuff. And we'll generate a style guide and then start generating source, look at references, and then start to implement them and then tune them in game. So we'll get them in Wwise, because a lot of the sound effects only really come together at runtime in the ship. So when you're flying a ship, it's kind of like you're playing a musical instrument in a way, because we'll implement all these different layers and one-shots, but it's actually the ship's movement and input that triggers all these. And we have different RTPCs that will attenuate sounds in pitch and volume, high pass, low pass and effects based on the action, the input from the ship. So yeah, at a high level, we go: this manufacturer typically does military ships, so everything sounds really robust and, say, aggressive. And this ship is a fighter, so everything needs to be sleek and fast and not too bulky. And then start tailoring the sounds to that. And that doesn't just pertain to thrusters. That could be anything like moving parts, ambiences, any kind of component work and stuff like that. So yeah, we want to try and establish a brand identity for each manufacturer, and then with each category of ship, make sure it sounds appropriate. So you've not got a fighter that sounds like a giant whale of a cargo ship, and vice versa.