Simon Gershon

It's a simple question, but it's got a lot of complicated answers to it. It depends on the manufacturer, the size of the vehicle, the form, the shape, the materials it's been built with, and also the thrusters, and then how fast it's going to go, what its requirement is within the game, and what it's going to do. That's an overview, and the most important thing is any sounds we give it, we want it to actually feel like it's coming from the incredible design of the ship. So that's the kind of headline. And if we dig into that further...

Yeah, I can add to that. Generally, the process is we'll have a team-wide kickoff, which will involve other departments. Usually we'll get a little summary, maybe a few sentences on what the ship's all about. And we'll usually take that, do a little more digging, have a look at the ship. What manufacturer is it? Is it Drake? Is it a little bit more rundown? Is it Origin? Super high tech? Then we'll gather our own references from popular media, discuss it amongst ourselves, get a kickoff from Simon, and that usually gives us a pretty good start and where we want to go with it.

Yeah, Simon comes in and makes some silly noises.

We'll look at all contemporary vehicles, real ones and fantasy ones, and then we'll all get together. I will generally make a lot of noises with my mouth or get very excited about maybe a dragster I might have seen online, or we might draw from any number of sound ideas that we've heard or experienced that we might want to bring to the ship. Recently we've been giving each ship a unique identity, so it's got its own signature, if you like, and you can identify it. So rather than just digging from a pool of sounds and just throwing those in, each ship needs its own considerations. The design of them is beautiful and we want to reflect all of the time going into the design with the sound design. We could draw our sources from any number of things. The ideal scenario is that we create the sounds ourselves now. We'll dig into this further, obviously, but realistically we don't have jet engines parked outside that we can go and record, so we've got to come up with interesting possibilities, and out of that we may record very unusual objects in different ways in order to get them into the game, into the vehicle.

Well, initially when I came, I thought, OK, this is a marketable object. When I buy a vehicle, a car or something, I want to feel the weight of it. I want to feel the beauty of it. I want to hear it. I want to listen to stuff. It's a spaceship game intrinsically, initially. And then the most important thing for me is to increase the size of the department. So we've got six people actually to create the sounds, and that means we can give it much more bespoke sounds than they had previously before I came, and the guys are very aware of the intent that I want to project for the vehicles. And I'm hogging too much of the time.

I can go back on the audio direction kickoff that we do in the early stages during pre-production, because that's something I feel like oftentimes is not talked about enough or is not given enough credit. Simon comes in these meetings and he usually has these really wild ideas and he comes up with these really specific keywords for us to go on with. He makes some actual verbal sound effects and these are super valuable. It's actually kind of fun to do, we have a good time doing it, but also his ideas that he brings from his years of experience give us a lot of starting points to build our ideas from. And every ship that he sees on screen, we show him that this is the new ship we need to work on, and he comes up with a bunch of really different ideas from all the past ships. And that's a very good inspiration point to start from.

Yes, they will. Because now, how many vehicles do you think we've increased the value of? About ten. So basically, we've got ten we've started with and there are hundreds to do. Yes, of course, we're going to be doing that. How we fit them into the schedule, I can't promise when that's going to be happening. But that's the intent, because the better the recent ships get, the more the divide is from the previous ships, so we want to update everything. I know there's so much more value we need to give the whole experience. I want it to be a great sound experience, a meaningful experience when you fly. I can't wait to get my vehicle to fly it because it's going to give me...

The start-up sound is particularly important as well, because it's your first introduction to how the vehicle sounds and thus how it feels, and it was always quite an enjoyable thing to watch YouTube videos where they get into the ship and then they start it up, and the reactions that they have to it. You know what kind of ship you're flying when you turn those engines on. And that was always kind of the approach with it.

Okay, there's a classic answer. It's 50% of a game or a film, but actually it's a little bit more. If I can just give a very brief... Your field of vision is, I don't know, about 120 degrees, what you can see. And then you've got 50 percent and 70 percent that you can actually visually see. But we've actually got to provide 360 degrees of the sound. So the stuff you can't see, we need to provide as well. And also, an experience is much more fulfilling when you've got, I'm going to use the word immersive and people will laugh at me, an enveloping spatial audio experience, an immersive experience that we can offer you sonically, where you can feel not only what you see in front of you, within the field of view, but you actually get the suggestion of stuff that's going on behind you, like the rockets kicking you and pushing you through the universe, the turn and the vibrations and the whole experience. Not only in spaceships, but to the greatest extent throughout the whole universe that we're going to occupy, in every sonic experience and every visual experience we travel through, we're there to support that.

I have this firm belief that we've got all of these amazing 2D artists, 3D artists, VFX artists, and they create a wonderful canvas. But nothing comes to life until you hear it. For me, the audio is that moment where a thing goes from being a work of art to a living, breathing thing, whether that's a spaceship or a character or a creature. And so when you say it's 50-50, it's certainly there, but I think it actually... it's just art. Not that art is not great.

Yeah, it's the language we're providing for the design. Theoretically things can exist without sound, because the design gives you a real perspective and dimension. But we can add the weight and value to the experience.

I always kind of thought as well, the visuals build the world, but the sound puts you in it. That's kind of how I experienced it.

That's placeholder, right? I think that stemmed from our old ship system breaking, and it created a game-breaking bug. So we took the opportunity to move on to the new ship system, and basically we had to just put placeholder on for all the other ships. Otherwise... it's better to have something than nothing, sound-wise. So that is something we are going to address.

Yeah, so it was a temporary fix to a game-breaking issue. And instead of reverting back to what we had before, we took the opportunity to work on a new system that brings back the older flybys, or something like the older flybys, which people have been asking for for so long. Hopefully an improved version of that, and that is something that we are actively working on at the moment.

We've already done some and they're going in. It's not... failing or disappointment for the community of the audio that they identify. We don't ignore it. We're going to address it. But the targeted way we're going to change it has to be mannered and has to be in line with the studio and in line with the actual systems that we have to implement them. We can't just drop tools. And yes, of course, we want to do that. It's not a case of just finding a sound effect, 'Oh, that should do it.' It has to be considered. And there's a lot to consider, because not only are we going to elevate the actual spatial audio as we go in the future towards VR and things that we're actually going to physically be able to touch and things like that. We've got to build for the future rather than just band-aid everything and say, well, that'd be fine. We do get round to it and we are getting round to it, and everything is being addressed and approached. But it can't be just done. I know this is probably going to almost feel like a stock answer. It can't be done now. But we want to do that, we do want to do that, and we are doing stuff. We are doing stuff now that isn't available yet. It's not necessarily going to be available for any of the future releases, but there's stuff going on in the background, because we've got no time to lose, I've got no time to lose, and we're growing the department, and we have grown the department in order to change the audio.

I would say this topic is probably the biggest open wound for us, because it's something that pops up a lot and we also experience it when we test our sounds, etc. We work really hard on the individual ship sounds that the players will experience when they play it, but that aspect is a really big part of it. So like Simon said, it won't be a band-aid type of solution. We want to make sure we're doing a really thorough system that will elevate the player's experience. They want to hear an Idris or a Perseus passing by from really far away, and we want them to identify, oh, okay, I know which ship that is just by hearing it. This is basically what we want to achieve. And when it passes over you, you want to feel it.

So the real audio and the real physics of audio in space, the physics with atmosphere. Well, it's kind of rule of cool sometimes. If we've got something we want to make a sound, then I want it to make a sound. Now, we can't just provide a roll-off. We can't just have the bass frequencies or the low pass just kicking in. We've got to feel vibration through our space suit and then through our helmet. We've got to consider how vibration works and how we achieve the real audio. Yes, you can't hear anything in space, but as soon as you start touching stuff, you'll get resonance through your suit and then through your helmet. And that's not just a case of creating a sound and then just rolling off the treble or the high frequencies. It's a bit more complicated than that. Now, I'm sure some people want real audio and some people don't want real audio. I'm not sure what the right answer is for that.

I think we really want to build a great cinematic experience first, because we're going to have to have cinematic sounds anyway in atmosphere. So if we can build on that foundation, then we can move on and do the realistic stuff at a later date once we've got the cinematic stuff in order, basically.

Build from that. I think there are areas of the game that we'll approach that give the feeling of more realism, like the difference between atmospheric flight and space flight, and that kind of juxtaposition between the two. It's like an artistic interpretation of no sound in space. But as Tristan said, we've got a lot of work to do on regular mode first.

It's got to be rule of cool. We're not going to please everyone all the time. But we don't want the game to be like a physics lecture. It's fun.

I think some people do, though. I think some people honestly want the game to be a physics lecture.

Well, maybe in the future we can provide for that. We've discussed it a lot, the no sound in space stuff and the realistic mode. But ultimately we design the sound in full and we shelve that sonic experience until we know how we're going to address that properly.

Well, yeah, that's again tied back into the realistic mode stuff. We're going to have to, at some point, look at atmospheric flight versus space flight. That's what I was saying before, we need to build on the cinematic experience first. So once we've got that cinematic experience, that is the atmospheric flight, and then we will have to look into changing things up for in space. And also the flyby stuff, Josh and I discussed it when we were designing the assets for it. We were looking at how we're going to put our flybys in space versus atmosphere, because there's going to be obviously no wind or pressure in space. So it would sound really weird if we put our atmospheric flybys in space, because you'd just hear all this wind coming. It just doesn't make sense. So we're already addressing it and we will have to address it again in the future.

Tying into that as well, wear and tear of engines. How things break. You want to be able to hear the engines. Over time we'll want the engine to change, because for it to make the same sound when it hasn't had a service, that's going to be a little bit dull. So we've got to think about that as well. We're considering that, working out how to do that, so it's organic and real in that sense as well, the actual changing sound from new to older.

One thing I can add is this is the first time I'm working on a live game, so it's a different experience for me, I'm learning a lot of stuff. Very often it's a balancing act between making sure everything is working and getting the new content in, and a lot of these questions are really fantastic ideas that we are always talking about internally, and we want to make sure they're implemented in the game in the correct way, so that we don't have to... like the way we have these old ships that don't have the current modern version that we are doing, so people find them underwhelming. So if we do a way to implement these new ideas into our new ships, we have to do it in a way that we don't have to do multiple passes for the older ships. We can come up with more systematic solutions and make sure everything is applying globally.

I don't know how much we can tell. It's probably a question for Graham. I have seen some images of art that include sonic booms. I don't know how much we can tell. I have seen it. So it could be there. We want it to be there.

Well, you've said that we're going to be doing sonic booms.

Yeah, I've sold it now.

If there are sonic booms, there will be noisy booms with them. I was going to feed you that... where we're working, as well as working and delivering and releasing stuff, we're doing R&D all the time. There's never a day when we don't consider what we're going to be recording, in terms of props and things that we use to recreate sounds, and also systems that we want to bring in. We're always animated and motivated in that sense. It's not like, well, here's another spaceship, let's just do this. Every day we talk about this, not just in ships, across the department. Everyone's actively thinking how to make the sound experience better.

It's very alive. It's a game that's grounded in realism. I know it's sci-fi, in space and set in the future, but it's grounded in realism in many aspects. I think it makes sense that at some point we will have sonic booms. I just don't see a way around it. And as I say, I've seen some VFX for it. I don't know when it'll come, but I've seen it.

The benefit of me coming in fresh means I've made a value judgment and assessment independently of any development issues or the scope of development. He probably knows much more about cinema than I do. I've worked on hundreds of films, hundreds of releasable materials, and it's going to be a cinematic game, and that's what I want. I'm going to raise the bar and we are raising the bar. That's the way we're going to do it. Now, that doesn't mean any of these considerations haven't been talked about before. We are not just suddenly coming to the idea. It doesn't mean we threw everything away. And it's unfair of me to suggest that prior to me coming, these considerations weren't active; they were. It's just there has to be a sense of scope for the release of them, and all the different departments have to work together organically.

Yeah, nothing we do is there to upset anybody. I read the comments constantly, but I can't address how many hundreds came in. We do listen and we don't ignore those things. I'm aware of many of the topics, which are not worth talking about now because we can't promise anything on that just yet.

And I would also say, in a project that's been in progress for this long, there's a lot of value in having people that have been on the project for a really long time, because they just know the project inside out. They know where the bodies are buried. I haven't discovered them yet. But there's also a big value in bringing new people in, like me, Josh, Nathan Gibson, Ilyas Malkov, our other vehicle audio designers, and Jack as well. And when we came in, we obviously come in with fresh ideas. There are already systems that were created in the past by previous great sound designers, some of them were my friends. So there are systems that pre-existed, but over time, like you said, things evolve, change, plans get scrapped, new ideas come in, and we have our own ideas. We want to make sure things are working, but we also want to improve things. And like with these pass-bys and vibration systems, we have a lot of ideas, but it's always a balancing act.

I think with the scope of the game as well, it can be quite easy to chase after all these different ideas that pop up and that people want. But we're trying to, as you said, tackle things one at a time, like we've improved the system, vibration...

Specifically, so we can start delivering after all the time talking about it. We've started boosting up the vibration system over the last couple of ships, and we're increasing that. We're recording new assets for that, new sounds that we can put into the vibration system, because a very expensive ship is going to rattle and vibrate completely differently to something that is stuck together with rivets. And we're doing that. That's being done.

Can you guess? The leaf blower. Yeah, it was a recording of a leaf blower that I turned into, I think I described it as disgusting, just through pitch shifting it, adding layers of distortion and saturation, and I was like, this sounds like a really gnarly engine, and made everyone individually come and listen to it, and then didn't end up using it on the ship.

You didn't use it?

No. Did use Simon's voice in a ship, though. Simon came in one day and said, I'm going to make you some spaceship sounds with my mouth.

I had a spare minute.

Yeah, so he came in, two minutes. I didn't have high expectations, but I was pleasantly surprised, and it made it into the Salvation, actually.

Thank you. But talk about the stuff we do with the Foley recordings, to create the alien ship and all of the organic sounds that we created. The Stinger.

The ball of goop. We went to toy stores and put putty and shaving foam and vegetables and all sorts and threw it into a bowl, mashed it up, recorded it.

We actually made working more unpleasant, because the room did have an unpleasant odour afterwards.

But we wanted it to sound organic. We wanted it to actually sound like you had some kind of skeletal exoskeleton, and rather than just using metal sounds or other recording sources, we wanted to give it this kind of visceral feeling of an animal. And that comes across. And there are other things. Some of the comments we got were for the Wolf, someone commenting about the seats. How was that done, Josh?

We did a bespoke Foley pass on the Wolf, because we wanted to make it feel like a luxurious experience. It needs to sound like fine leather when you sit down. And we didn't end up using fine leather for the recording, but we did use my rubber green backpack, which just had the right texture to it.

Yeah, and it got a comment. So a very simple sound source like Joshua's bag became part of the Foley experience of sitting in the chair. The smallest of insignificant sounds can give you a fantastic experience, and it's not just necessarily the moving parts, the guns, the thrusters. If something like that raises the enjoyment of the game, we're up for doing that because we want to. We're elevating the richness of the sonic experience.

I was surprised people commented about it, actually, because it is quite a subtle element to it, but it does add to the feeling of the ship, especially when it's your introduction to the ship, when you sit down.

It's hugely frustrating, because we put a lot of care into what we want to provide, and we're getting shout-outs for bugs because it ruins the experience for the player. And that's like puncturing a balloon. It's very disheartening, but we need to find a way of fixing it and getting it back on course. And there are a lot of bugs and we're fixing them as quickly as we can. The disappointment is... I don't know. How can you express the disappointment when you've built something and then it slips out from working to not working? It's not deliberate.

I think there are a lot of old bugs that, once we introduce our new systems, like the new flight system that we got a couple of months ago, that eliminates a lot of those issues. Not all of them, but it eliminates them. So we just need to focus on improving our systems there, to future-proof. There's always going to be bugs, though. I worked in QA, I know.

How many did you come through a day? How many did you fix? There's a phenomenal amount going through QA, and there's a phenomenal amount that gets fixed. But obviously the ones that fall through the net are repeat offenders. We've got plenty of questions about any number of things which are ruining the game flow, and of course we're going to fix those things. It's just when. I can't promise when, and it would be foolish of me to give a date or to say something, 'Yeah, we're looking', because those are pretty hollow words, saying we're looking at it. But I'm sure that's been said a lot. Of course we're looking at it, because it's not a complete game until those things are flowing better.

The mistake that often gets made, and this has nothing to do with audio, this has to do with all game bugs, is you think one bug has one cause. And it doesn't. One bug can have seven causes. And you fix one, you fix two, you fix three, and then you find out the fourth fix actually caused a ninth cause of it that didn't exist prior. And so it's just this continual chase.

You never stop. It's a giant organism where we're not working in a vacuum or independent of any of the other departments. It's like a lot of termites going around doing their business, and we all have to work together. You never stop.

We wish we could do everything all at once and we just can't. So we stay vigilant, we bring in new people when necessary, we reevaluate process, we continuously try to improve so we can do more and more every year, and you just keep working at it.

For vehicles, we're bringing out a lot of vehicles all the time. And the most important thing is I want to make sure the vehicles come out better and better each time, and I'm always looking for space in the schedules to change the legacy stuff. There are plenty of vehicles that need to come up to scratch as soon as possible. I want the vehicles department to be the one that gets the most attention first, and I want it to be almost like a perfect game being hosted by Star Citizen. Because that's what we're about. We're about releasing vehicles that work, that don't need to go back to the garage to be fixed. I want them to go out well and perfect. And then all of these systemic and legacy problems will be fixed the more we escalate the successes.

Shut your eyes. And then when you hear the sound of a ship, you know which ship that is. You know which manufacturer it is, you know the voice that's used in that ship, that that's from that ship and that manufacturer. So that's the dream scenario, that we get what's called an earworm. It's something you memorise and you know is the sound of that ship. I can make many references from other films and games, but fundamentally that would be the dream scenario. You close your eyes, you know that ship's behind you. And indeed we have to do that with 360-degree audio. You need to hear it first before you see it. So that's the dream scenario. And that's a whole topic in itself, how we're going to be bringing bespoke sound to each manufacturer, how we're going to play with sound in order to... how do we achieve the sound of luxury leather compared with the sound of a plastic tractor seat? How do we do that sonically? There's absolutely no time to talk about that. But we do want to grade the sonic experience by the price of the ship and the quality of the ship, the weight of the ship and the function of the ship. But the most dreamlike thing for me: shut your eyes and you know what you're listening to.

That includes ships that you're in and ships that are flying past you.

I want people to know that we are listening. There are a lot of suggestions that people come out with, like ship horns, and we have talked about it. Actually, a better example would be ship flybys. We actually pushed the priority right up for that because we really wanted that. I know that the community really wanted that too. We are listening. We're here to improve the experience for you on audio. We want these things too. Sometimes it does just take time, and we are blocked by other things. We do need code support for a lot of stuff, but we discuss a lot of the things that were asked today internally, and we are changing priorities for things like the flybys, for instance. It just takes some time.

Yeah, I would say again the fact that this is a live service game, and our work constantly comes out and we get to see the players' reaction, it's a pretty nice feeling. It's very validating, and seeing the positive feedback gives us more motivation. And when we see things like 'I really like the engine-on sound' or 'when you land the ship', it gives us that extra motivation to keep the standard at least at that level or push it even beyond, so people experience those nice moments time and time again.

If you compare the ship audio experience where it was a year ago to what it is now, we want to do that again next year and again. So we're just constantly pushing for quality.

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.

What do you want to know? What do I want to offer the game? Well, we're going to be immersive at some point, so we will be going much more immersive. So what does that mean to the player? I know it's a very overused word. We're going cinematic because that's what I was brought on to do. So every environment you're in, you're going to feel like you're in the environment. I don't want to go into the nitty gritty details about what systems we're developing with Star Audio or any other systems I would like to bring to the game. But fundamentally, I want this to sound as good as it can be. I don't want to make rash promises like the best game ever. Perhaps let's try and make it the second best and then people will remember that, and then we could go to the first best a little bit later on down the line. But you're going to feel like you're actually in something. Now, one of the biggest experiences... Am I ranting already? Everyone wants to be in a spaceship, and when you're in a spaceship, you want to feel like you're in a spaceship. I want to make things rock and vibrate and I want you to feel moved.

Atmos?

Yeah, Atmos and a little bit more than Atmos.

A little bit more than Atmos?

Yeah, Atmos Plus. Don't ask me what that is just now. I'm not changing Dolby. Don't worry about that, Dolby, if you're listening.