Sound designers explain Wwise audio work: sandstorm triggers, Xi'an Scout and Avenger ship sounds, positional audio and mix states. The vehicle art director covers the crashed Javelin, Redeemer and Starfarer updates, asset reuse and the Bengal and Polaris interiors.
Sound design in general is, well, basically, think about it that the game becomes completely silent. And what sound design is, is basically just populating the whole game with sounds. So it goes from spaceships to just ambiences or just cloth movements and just characters talking as well.
So you work on a variety of things. You're not just focused on ships or focused on environments or people. You kind of float throughout the entire Star Citizen universe.
When I first joined, I remember one of the first sounds I did was the sounds for the Avenger. And I've been focusing a little bit also on the Xi'an Scout. Then most of the time I spend on the ambiences and on the Foley.
I've worked in Wwise before. I've just been doing my graduation as a sound designer. It was all based on Wwise. I touched a little bit of FMOD, but I was really lucky to join the company after the transition from FMOD to Wwise. That was quite a big task to take on for the audio team.
TL;DRThe sandstorm's wind sound comes from the storm effect itself, while silent audio trigger spots in the level start resonating as it approaches, so audio varies with where you are.
Basically we would have the sound for the sandstorm itself come from the actual visual effects of the sandstorm. But obviously it will be moving on the map. So if we have metal rattling or, if you're inside the Javelin, obviously all the sounds will need to come through to a specific area in the level. So we would have the sound for the sand breeze, or mostly for the wind noises, coming directly from the sandstorm itself. But as it moves and approaches different areas, that's where we will place different silent audio, let's call it like that, silent audio trigger spots that will start resonating as the sandstorm approaches.
Yeah, that's correct. So basically you can be in different areas on the map and you will have different results audio-wise on what will start resonating around you.
TL;DRSome audio is created and retweaked by hand, then Wwise handles playback, with a wind-loudness meter driving the surrounding audio triggers in real time.
It's a little bit of both. Obviously we need to create some audio for that. Sometimes we use libraries, but it never comes straight out of the library. We always need to retweak things. So once we've got all those layers, as we call them, then we start populating the level. And we will let Wwise handle what sounds need to play and how they will have to play. So in the case of the sandstorm, we basically had, it's called a meter. So we will meter how loud the wind will be, and based on that, it will drive the audio from all the audio triggers that are attached in a specific area in the level. So that means that if you have a wind gust that happens, we will know exactly what the volume parameter is at that specific moment, and that will drive the audio of everything surrounding it. It's a bit like side-chaining, but it's actually the opposite, because side-chaining will basically duck down a sound based on another sound. In this case, we bring up the level of some sounds based on how loud the wind is.
That's one of the things that Wwise allows us to do. It's one of the tools that are inside Wwise, and then we can drive real-time parameters, we call it RTPC, again based on volumes. Mostly you can use it for mixing, but it can be used in more creative ways, just like we did with the sandstorm.
I don't really have an answer, in a way, because most of the time we do know how a specific spaceship needs to sound, but we never exactly know how it will sound until we start populating all those elements. Usually the way we approach it is we start to build our own library. So if we know, for example, for the Xi'an Scout, they asked for a less synthy kind of sound, but more natural elements in a way. And that means that we started creating libraries from there. So we end up with tons and tons of audio files. And from there, we start taking them and putting them in the DAW, which is our software for editing audio. And then from there it's just a matter of cut and paste. It's like creating a puzzle with all the audio elements.
TL;DRNew engine parameters from audio coders let the team go back and add more sound for rolling, pitching, braking and engine strain, so players get more audio feedback on ship movement.
Just recently we got some more help from the audio coders, because one of the main problems that we had with the sounds of the spaceships is that we didn't have many real-time parameters to describe certain things. So, for example, maneuvering, like rolling or pitching your ship. We couldn't really work much on that one because we didn't have any numbers coming out from the engine itself. So we got all these new parameters from the audio coders, and that's when we really need to go back and add much more sound and refactor all of that. Because we want to give more feedback to the player. You want to know when your ship is rolling, pitching, or you want to hear your engine braking. We have engine strain as well. So that means if you're going at a certain speed and you're braking, all of a sudden you can have a ramp-up of the engine so that you can understand how much the engine is working at that moment.
So if your HUD is damaged or broken, or if you're a more instinctual pilot, you can sort of tell how fast you're going and how your ship is maneuvering based on the sounds that the different thrusters for pitch, yaw and roll are making.
No, to be honest, because that's one of the things that we call a mix state. So we just want to make sure that we have the right sound at the right moment for the right ambience, or for whatever is in the level. And then when the music comes in, we'll have different mix states, which will decide what's going to be the most important thing to hear at that specific moment. And that's where we let Wwise handle all of that based on the rules that we put in the game. So if we have an important moment when the music will need to ramp up, then we will start bringing down all the other sound effects.
Yes. I would say 90% of the time they're all positional sounds based in the level. So if you move your head around, you can actually understand where those sounds are coming from. And regarding 5.1 and 7.1, that's all handled in Wwise itself. Since the audio is already positional, for Wwise it's not difficult to understand. If you have a 5.1 system, it will always be 3D, so it will start going around your speakers.
TL;DRAlien sounds come from experimenting with instruments, synthesizers and glitchy recordings, such as squishy dog food and vegetable sounds, then manipulating them and syncing them to the animation.
It's mostly playing with the different instruments that you have. I like creating glitchy sounds, and that's really what makes things sound not realistic. So you can play with synthesizers, you can play with different tools. One of the ways I created some sounds for the Xi'an Scout was, since they wanted it to be organic, glitchy kinds of sounds, I just recorded dog food, for example, and vegetables and things like that. It makes really squishy sounds.
Yes, exactly. And then from there, it was just a matter of playing with the different tools that we have. And again, it's a matter of creating an entire library of sounds that you recorded and manipulated. And after that, it's a matter of doing a cut and paste and making sure that it syncs with the actual animation.
TL;DRBiome-dependent weather sounds are intended through blended positional sounds that change with weather and time of day, though not all the technology is ready yet.
Yeah, of course it will. We don't have all the tech ready for that right now. But the idea is to have, again, all the different positional sounds in the level. Each different audio trigger spot, each different sound, we can have a blend between different sounds, and they can change according to the weather, according to the wind, according to whether it's daytime or nighttime. We're trying to make things as dynamic as possible, because usually you would have a bespoke event in a game and you would know exactly what's going to happen and when it's going to happen. In these cases it's a bit different. It's more like combining different ideas for different solutions. There's never one solution that addresses them all.
Yes, that's correct. So one of the things would be the ambiences, for example. If you're in the desert, you would have a specific ambience. If the temperature is quite high, you would have a different ambience. If the temperature drops down and it's nighttime, you would have a different ambient sound.
TL;DRThe vehicle art director says the team is very busy with unannounced new and legacy ships, multi-crew item work and Squadron, with a focus on raising everything to a standard, and gives no dates.
I wish that was the case. No, we're just super busy. We've got a significant amount of ships coming on board for the PU, which I can't talk about at this moment. We've got a lot of work being done on the legacy ships, which I can't talk about either. There's all the ship item work that's being done for the multi-crew stuff, so there's a huge gameplay push for that as well. There's obviously Squadron ongoing. There's all the new mechanics to think about. And we went over the schedule, I think the day before yesterday, and it was going a very long way into the distance. I can't say when, but you get the gist of what's going on. The primary focus from CitizenCon is we want to focus on bringing everything up to a certain standard. And that includes some legacy ships that Chris doesn't want left behind. So he wants to give them as much love as the new stuff that we've done. They're coming back into the schedule so the game runs better. The older ships are more expensive. So, yeah, there's a lot.
TL;DRNathan Dearsley apologizes that few had seen the Javelin and says the crashed-ship workflow is resolved though not fully finished, making wrecks good points of interest once planets go live.
Yeah, sorry about that. It was quite funny. When we recorded the footage for that, it kind of dawned on me. I was like, you know what? No one's seen this ship. And I actually apologized on the thing. I don't think it made the cut, but it's just like, yeah, really sorry. Whoever's got one, it's there. You can fix it if you want. But no, it was really a domino from the Starfarer stuff that we'd done. And I spoke briefly about that at the time, wanting this kind of work approach to scale. And myself and Chris caught up, and I kind of shot myself in the foot to some extent and said, look, everyone's seen the Starfarer and now it's done. We need to move on. We can do this stuff. We need to make sure that it's going to scale and it's going to work. And it does. And it's by no means 100% finished right now, because there was the demo, there's a deadline, and you always want to take a little bit longer to get things resolved. But it's there in its foundation. So with that capital ship, the downed Idris as well, and the Starfarer, and the Cutlass, that workflow is resolved. And so this becomes a really good point of interest now for the planets when they go live. Like I said to you before, don't expect to see all the time these massive epic wrecks in a desert. I think it's just as powerful to just see a bunker door in the floor, and you drop down and then you realize, oh, actually, I'm inside a ship that's got buried over time. So it's about creating options and about creating gameplay. And I think we're on the right path with that. I think it's going to be pretty good.
TL;DRGiving ships and environments a history through small ambient stories makes them feel lived in, and Squadron 42 lets the team do this in ways the persistent universe currently can't.
It's kind of a double-edged sword. As a vehicle guy, you've got this trait that you want to make things aesthetically pleasing. The shape needs to work and you're making these beautiful ships. You're creating sculptures, right? But a sculpture without history is just a thing. It's just there, in my opinion. And as I touched on in the video, we're all environment artists. I spent a long time being an environment artist. And one of the things that was always a very important thing to get across was some kind of history to put into the environments that you're creating, or if not history, a future. And if you can create this with a background script and tell these little ambient stories of, oh, there was a dude in the vent there, why was he in the vent? It's like when you see Newt in Aliens, and she drops down into where she stayed and she's got all the little toys in the corner and marks on the wall, a photo of her parents. There are all these little things that are so easy to do. And you think about it from the ground up like that, and it's just that extra layer of thought that goes into these things. And I just really like that stuff. And as I said in the video, it's a break for the guys to try and do that, because we can't really do that in the PU, because if I go off and put a photo of his wife on the captain's console on a Javelin bridge, at the moment everyone's going to have a photo of his wife on that thing. There are systems on the horizon to sort that stuff out, but as soon as we get a little nugget where we can tell this little story, it's great. And that's why Squadron is a bit of a relief for that stuff as well. So we've got the Idris on the go, and now it's starting to get all these little personal touches into these spaces that make it feel like it's lived in and not just a sterile box.
TL;DRPlayer ship dirt, litter and decoration are something they'd like and will push for, but not right now; the Flowgraph part is easy and storing the data on the server is the tricky bit.
There are all these kinds of systems. There's also the maintenance side of things. Another thing that we want to achieve is that if you don't clean your ship, it's going to get dirty and it's going to fill up with rubbish and whatnot. And there are these systems in place that we can prototype now. And that's something I would like to do. I'd love it if you play the game and then log off for a month and come back, and your ship's just in complete disarray. I would love to see stuff like that. And it's definitely something that we will be pushing for, but not right now. But the systems are there. It's Flowgraph driven. A Flowgraph system that injects litter and marks on the walls and stuff is fairly straightforward to do. But it's how you store that information on the server. That's the tricky bit.
TL;DRThe Redeemer is on the list, but it needs rework to fit the newly settled ship metrics and component systems, which is substantial work on a very complex model.
Yes, it is. And if you want a little bit more information on what's going on now, I'll speak quite openly about it. Obviously the Redeemer came from The Next Great Starship. And it was at a time when the project was in its infancy. And obviously having people off-site make these things for us is a fantastic idea and it's great. But it's got to a point where we're realizing that, again, it's linked to the legacy ship stuff, that a lot of stuff wasn't really resolved at that point. The standard metrics: how big is the doorway, how steep is the staircase? How do you get into a turret? Can we reuse those turret metrics and animations for other uses? So we've got all that information now, and it's really a case of going back over these things and the legacy ships and making sure that they work with those new systems. And it goes way above that. That's just the basics. We've got all the ship components coming in. The ship won't be able to function without these, and these are actually going to be physical things that you can interact with in your ship. If they're not there, the ship will not function. There are these layers coming in that, for me, are going to unlock a lot of really cool gameplay. For me, with a lot of the ships, you look at them and you can't put your finger on what that space is for. When you're making the bathroom, you know it's a bathroom because there's a bath in it or a toilet, but there are a lot of spaces where you're just like, what can we do here? How can we give this place purpose? And the components are feeding into that. And we're like, oh, you know what? If the shield generator is going there, then we should totally address it like this. And that's a positive thing as well. But the Redeemer for sure, we know how important it is, and it is on that list.
So the model that's in the hangar right now was the model that Paul D'Alessi and the team there created, and we just brought it into CryEngine, but it has to be rebuilt with the component system in mind, with the metrics in mind. So it's got a substantial amount of work.
Yeah, they're just incredibly complex ships. I've got quite a lot of experience. I've handled some really complex models in the past, and I get a little bit of a fear factor even now when I open a Max file. 3ds Max is the program that we make the ships in. And it's really complex, and there are a lot of dependencies on one another. It's kind of crazy in a lot of respects, but it's worth it in the end when you pull it off. It is actually pretty much rocket science.
Yes. The answer is yes. It's kind of amusing, because the artist that made that is Matt, and it was an ongoing joke between us all when we were making it. Not a joke as in, oh, let's not put a chair there for the lols. It was a case of a few people went up and said, well, where's the captain's seat? And we were like, oh, yeah. It wasn't there in the concept, and I can't remember why it wasn't put in, but it will be put in. It's a bit of a given that the captain would want to sit at a desk. Anyone would want to sit at a desk. So it will get put in. And whenever that will be, it wouldn't take long to fix that.
TL;DRThe Javelin is nearly done, with two interior areas left (one significant) before final detail and optimization, but showing it is up to Chris Roberts.
Ask the big boss. The big boss being Chris. He was here this week, actually, and we went over the ship. There are two internal areas left to do. One of them is fairly significant: it's the cargo bay. The ship has been designed really well, actually. It's been designed how I'd expect it to be. So the sub-decks are engineering, the mid deck is all habitation and the top deck is all technical. So you've got this beautiful separation on each of the decks. We've got this lift at the front of the ship, and there's obviously a lift at the back to balance the internal route out. But we've done a really nice little touch at the front where there's a very thick glass panel, and you've got these two forks at the front of the Javelin going away. So I said to the guy, when you're in this lift, I want to feel like I'm looking down Fifth Avenue, these huge structures going away from you. So it's quite cool. There are a lot of cool little touches going into it. There are two main areas left to get to what we call LOD0. And once LOD0 is done, it's a case of going through your profile and optimizing it. And then she's ready. Turrets are done, thrusters are done, bodies are done. It's all there. And I want to share it. It's just when the boss is happy to.
The archetypes, like technical, habitation, all that kind of stuff, you reuse them. So you get to a point where you can pretty much block the ship out using the existing assets from Aegis. And then it's a case of, okay, this is just too much of the same, let's remix it a little bit. So it does save us a significant amount. And I think on the schedule we optimize around 40% less time. So if we're going to start a new multi-crew ship now with a substantial interior, for example a MISC ship, we would know that we've got 40% of that covered already with the existing assets and textures and shaders. And then the other 60% is what makes that ship unique.
Yeah, it's interesting you say that. So the Bengal, which has been in production and which we showed a little while ago, obviously we haven't shown all of it. There are the hangars that you've seen. The bridge on that ship is four stories high, and there's another two stories above that in a sub-bridge, should we say. And then we've got all the corridors, we've got the ready room, we've got habitation, the toilets, the showers. So we had an awful lot of stuff already, and it was Dan who originally did the raw concepts for that stuff, like the overall profiles of what a bulkhead should look like. If you spawn next to an RSI wall, you should know within two seconds you're in an RSI ship. And that's just through bold approaches to an angle. So the RSI stuff will always slope away from you at 30 degrees or slope into you at 30 degrees. And if you're going to have two slopes on one wall, generally one is roughly 60% dominant over the other one. So that way, if you spawn in an Imperial ship or an Imperial hangar, you get it, not just because of the colors and the tones, but it's very brutalist. It's very monolithic when you break it down. And that's what we wanted to push for the Bengal stuff, simply because with the scale of that ship, you had to have a more primitive approach to the art. So how do you make less go further? That almost dictated the art style. And then Dan kicked off on the Polaris with Paul and the concept team. And for sure, he came to us and I said, look, take all this stuff. We've made all this stuff already, see how far you get. And if you look at the concepts and the stuff that we've shown on the Bengal, you will see roughly about 40% reuse and 60% to make it unique. And that's a given.