Developers present six new Persistent Universe racetracks in 3.18, including a Daymar canyon track and the Lorville Outskirts track, with mobiGlas racing missions, entry fees, brackets, checkpoints and world records. The audio team discusses racing sound, the Claudius tool, team expansion, propagation tech and VoIP plans.
That's a good question. We should ask that one to Todd because he took us by surprise too when he asked us to do that. But our goal is always to add more gameplay that's fun, and quickly, for the players. This was a good onboarding task also for one of our new level designers. It was a good first step toward implementing more racing into the universe. It's definitely a step in the right direction. So I'm excited to see what's going to be coming in the future for racing, but for now, six racetracks, I think this was a pretty easy win for all the teams that worked on this. And it was just fun to make, and hopefully it's going to be fun to play.
TL;DRIt's a brand new racetrack near the garden on Daymar, built in natural canyons and reminiscent of Snake Pit but with added verticality, underpasses, better landmarks and more detail.
So this is going to be a brand new racetrack. So this is not one of the community racetracks that we picked up. This is a new one. It's right next to the garden on Daymar. They have a pretty cool range of mountains and canyons that are one next to another. And we decided to make a racetrack there for multiple reasons. One, because it's close to a QT point. Two, because we already have these natural canyon formations for players to race in. It also reminds us a lot of the Snake Pit racetrack, so in that regard it's going to be very familiar to the players. There's very similar turns and curves, the atmosphere is the same. So it's going to be familiar for the racers, but there's also some new parts that are closer to mountains where we added a little bit of verticality, we added those underpasses under the rocks, which are very memorable. So we just took Snake Pit and basically brought it to the next level. So this is the evolution of racing. It looks better. It feels better. It's beautiful. We had a lot of artists work on this. Louis Max, he did a great job art-wise and it really shows in the minor details. When you get closer to the ground on the human scale, there's a lot more detail. We have better landmarks. It's just a great fun track to race in.
Yeah, we've actually added the missions on Snake Pit too. So the time trials are going to be available on Snake Pit. We had to update the visuals of Snake Pit a little bit also to accommodate for the checkpoints. But the golden path of Snake Pit is still the same. We just had to add some visuals for a few extra checkpoints to make sure that people can't skip above the canyons.
Yeah, so they're going to have to grind some reputation in order to unlock all the tracks. Obviously, the first tracks are supposed to be a little bit easier, so the player is going to open up the mobiGlas. There's going to be a new racing career. And they're going to be able to pay an entry fee to race. And we have multiple brackets. I'm not too familiar with how many brackets we have, but we definitely have bronze, silver, gold, platinum. And then depending on how fast the player finishes the race, he's going to get a time and some credits depending on where he ranked on the bracket. And there's also going to be a world record to beat that's going to be based on whoever has the fastest record on that track.
It's very similar to the Snake Pit, so I think this one's about 10 kilometers more or less. We have other ones that are bigger, that are about 30 kilometers. This one goes in a loop, so we're going to try to have in the future races that are loops, some that are linear, so we're going to play with that.
Exactly. So we have visual checkpoint markers right now. We see one right there. So once you go through, it's going to show you the next checkpoint that you need to go to. These are going to be very helpful. I would suggest that players, the first few times they do the races, they do them slowly just to be sure that they don't crash. Learn the race, and then after a few laps on the race, you'll be able to do them pretty easily, I think. And I currently hold the world record on this race. It's one minute, 22 seconds. So it will be the world record until everybody else in the PU gets in there and just destroys me.
TL;DRGraham Philipson says it looks beautiful and he can't wait to tune audio for it, while Nemanja Panic adds the tracks can be raced at night and hide one to three podium Easter eggs each.
Yeah, well, we'll talk a little bit later about how Corentin's going to be looking at the flight experience from an audio perspective, and this is another angle on that, and we have to make the ships work in a way that sounds good in all circumstances, and this is a very unique circumstance, but it looks absolutely beautiful, and I certainly can't wait till we get our hands on it and start tuning the audio experience to it as well.
What's important to mention also is these tracks, you'll be able to race them at night also. We have amazing lighting artists that did some amazing work on these tracks. So whether you're racing at daytime or nighttime, the experience is going to be different, but I love to see these tracks, the way they're lit up at night, especially the landmark on this one with the fire on top, it looks great. One other thing to know is we did hide some Easter eggs. Some are going to be easy to find, others are going to be harder to find because the tracks are so big. We did place a few podiums around the tracks in key locations where we have some nice shots for print screens. So it's going to be up to the players to find those podiums. There's between one and three podiums hidden per track. So good luck finding them.
This one has, I'm not sure if I remember correctly, I think it's a medium landing pad where we saw the landmark location with the fire on top. There is a landing pad there, but I'm not sure the size of the landing pad. And I think we would need to put in a large one so that maybe a Caterpillar can land there with a couple of spectators. So we do want to have nice places where people can land and watch the race.
TL;DRJared Huckaby says racing work is often suited to newer team members and fitting available schedules across a huge project, and Nemanja Panic notes only two of the Montreal level designers worked on the tracks.
You make a good point about this being a starter task for a brand new member of the team. Not everybody that works on Star Citizen is at the same level of involvement, is at the same level of experience, is at the same level of commitment. And a lot of these times when you see these outward things like, oh, why are they on this and also this and also this? It's because you're looking for tasks to fit schedules. You're looking for tasks to fit openings in availabilities. You're looking for tasks that are suitable for the talent and capabilities of folks that you're trying out. You'll get all kinds of things. You'll get the major things, and you'll get the medium things, and you'll get the little tiny, fun, fluffy things, and all the stuff in between, especially when you're a project that's five studios wide and 800-some-odd people strong.
On the Montreal team, I think we're five or six level designers right now. And out of the five or six level designers, only two worked on those tracks, so myself and Dane. So we have other level designers working constantly on other things which are not racing specific. But everybody has their own opinion on what we should be working on.
Oh, man, that would be a question for Dane. I don't know the exact size of this track, but we're also hovering, I think, around the 18 to 20 checkpoints. So these are, I'd say, our small to medium-sized tracks. We're going to explore larger tracks. When we have more power from level art, we're going to dabble into larger tracks here.
Well, whoever raced the Lorville Gateways track before, which was renamed to Lorville Outskirts now, it's the same exact start position. So it's behind the CBD building. We can see it right there. So the start point is right behind the CBD building. It's a very straightforward track. There's a few turns and then there's a couple of straight lines. It looks good. It feels good. Checkpoints help a lot. Right now, we're at the phase where we're just polishing the checkpoints, where we want the checkpoints to lead the players a little bit better into the turns.
So I'm now Director of Audio Technology. The name director feels an odd thing to me, but I'm doing what I've always done, basically: try to make the right decisions for the audio technology in the game, and now I get to do it from a slightly fancier place.
So I'm a technical sound designer, so basically I'm taking care of all the interaction between the sound and the game. So basically making things that already sound cool sound even cooler in the game, reacting to the environment and the player's actions, for example.
So we realized that we had all these ships and the game is quite old now. So the first ships were using some sort of older technology or other systems that we were developing at that time. And the further we went on, these systems evolved as well, and the requirements and the needs for the game changed as well. So now my work would be to take the state of all the ships, see what works best and what doesn't work, and basically just make it all sound consistent and great, and give players the wow effect that sometimes I think we kind of lack in ship flight.
TL;DRRacing needs extra audio emphasis in the cockpit to convey speed and danger, which the usual systemic audio solutions don't focus on, so the audio team wants tools to exaggerate those things.
Yeah, really great stuff, the races. So what I think now is players can be in different contexts. And races will be a big context, and it needs to have that little thing in addition to the normal flight, maybe to really make it more cinematic. Really giving the player the feel of speed and danger, maybe, because you can crash of course. So that's really something you have to consider when working on the different contexts players can be in.
Yeah, for a game as huge as Star Citizen, we have a lot of contexts to deal with, and we try to come up with as many systemic solutions as possible so that things just work, and people can throw features into the game that we don't even know about and they just work from an audio perspective. But something like racing is a unique thing where what you're interested in is all happening very much in the cockpit and in that narrow path ahead of you. And systemic solutions don't really focus on that quite so much. So giving Corentin and his team some tools to allow us to exaggerate those things.
That's exactly what I'm working on right now. Some sort of new vibration system that would reflect these kinds of things, the real stress on the ship, or sometimes no stress at all, and depending on the brand as well. So this is all going to be in the huge rework that we're doing. It's going to be really amazing. And also, I'm just thinking now, races can also be from an external perspective. So we need to also take care of flybys and pass-bys, and what if you are in a crowd just watching the race? What's the sound going to be like? So that's also one thing we have to consider.
TL;DRClaudius is still very much in progress, an ambitious effort to move all audio triggers into one tool, and they are progressing well while working through remaining edge cases.
No, Claudius is definitely still a thing. It's a hugely ambitious thing to do. We have over 20,000 audio triggers triggered by our game. They all come from different places. They all come from different tools. And Claudius is an attempt to bring all that stuff together so it can all interact in ways that are natural. But obviously, when we're talking about taking 20,000 audio triggers and all the code that drives how they play, and we're shifting it all into a new tool, without exception, everything is moving into this thing. It is ambitious. I knew it was ambitious when we started it. I'm only now realizing that it was more ambitious than I even realized at the time. But it wouldn't be Star Citizen if it wasn't ambitious. And yes, we are definitely progressing really well on it. All the sound designers who see it are very excited about what it does. And we're just trying to get over that hill. We're looking under all the rugs and finding all the cases that it doesn't quite suit just yet and figuring out ways around those. And once we're over all those little humps, we'll be much closer.
It's not yet, because the way we've approached it is we want to first port over a lot of the stuff that already exists, because when introducing the new system, we ideally don't want to be running the old system in parallel. Now, there may be cases where that has to be done in order for us to get releases out and start fixing issues and things like that. But one thing we can't afford with that approach is anything janky, especially at runtime. So we need our new solution to at least match everything that's already there before we allow it out into the wild. Because we don't want to degrade the experience. We only want to improve it.
TL;DRGraham Philipson says people notice audio when it's awesome or when something is off, and compares the discomfort of almost-right sound to the uncanny valley, which the brain picks up on easily.
Yeah, absolutely. There are two things that make people notice the audio. One is that it's completely awesome, like a huge singularity explosion or something like that. And the other thing is when something's not quite right. And that is the big problem that we're up against. Like I say, we've got to make sure that everything we do doesn't break anything that isn't already broken. And you're absolutely right. If things don't sound right, the brain is very quick to notice. Whereas visually, if things don't quite look right, there are definitely...
I guess if you want a visual analogy, it's kind of like the uncanny valley. It's that sense of discomfort you feel when something's almost as it should be, but not quite, and you start to feel a little nauseous because it's not quite right. I think you get that sensation from audio much more easily.
TL;DRThe new audio rooms are much larger and usable though not fully completed, giving a less claustrophobic space and room to test and mix in surround, which the old rooms didn't allow.
So the new facility, from our perspective, isn't complete, because building an audio room is not the same as building a huge high-rise office building. And we have to get different contractors in to build those rooms out properly, but you're absolutely right. The rooms we've got now, they're usable, they're huge in comparison to the old ones. And with that size, there was a real sense of claustrophobia, I think, in the old rooms, and that's gone away and there's a sense of space. And with that sense of space, you can have a real surround setup that is comfortable and makes sense for the kind of work that we're trying to do.
Every time we do an audio show, people ask about the game being mixed for surround sound. And it's always been that we have limited facilities because they were so small, but now this is going to make a big change for that.
Yeah, absolutely. And myself personally, having a slightly fancier office now, I'm going to say slightly, you know that's not true. But it's not just about having a nice room for myself. I've actually got room to test in surround now, which is something I didn't have before out on the floor.
TL;DRThe audio team has been given the green light to potentially quadruple in size to finish Squadron 42 audio while maintaining Star Citizen, and is hiring across sound design, programming, technical roles and a new Audio Rigger position.
Well, we're working towards painting all of the audio onto Squadron 42. There's plenty in there already, but there's a heck of a lot of work to be done. And we need to continue to maintain Star Citizen while that's ongoing. And we've recently been through a lot of planning, and that gave us a clear understanding of just how much work there is. And we've gone to the execs and we've been given the green light to grow our team, potentially quadruple our team from where it was a year ago. And that's something that we've kind of asked for in the past, but just by doing the analysis on it and realizing just how small we are compared to the company as a whole, we've been able to open up a lot of positions. We're looking for sound designers at all levels. We're looking for a couple of audio programmers. We're looking for technical sound designers. We have a new position called Audio Rigger, which is someone who goes in and takes sounds and implements them in the game. So they're kind of like an implementer role without so much of the design side. But we have vacancies across the board, and that's mostly just because we're trying to see out these projects.
TL;DRBeyond the topic of Claudius, the audio team says a propagation system and other tooling are very close to ready and will be presented soon, aiming to free sound designers from implementation and markup work.
We're not just on Claudius. From a tech perspective, we've got a propagation system, which I've talked about in the past, and it is so close to being ready. So we'll be presenting that at some point very soon. I think people can see what that's doing for us. And again, that's with a view to trying to close out some work. It's about streamlining the sound designer's experience. So a lot of the tech that we're coming up with within both audio code and tech sound design is really focused on allowing the sound designers to be pure sound designers and not spend all their time implementing and not spend all their time working on level markup and things like this. So we have a lot of tech that we've been working on for a long time. I hold my hands up. But we are so, so close to getting these things out now. And I think they're going to really free up a lot of sound designer time.
TL;DRVoIP needs work and has unscheduled backlog items to make remote players hear the speaker's surrounding ambience, improve voice tuning, and balance the VoIP mix against growing in-game audio.
It needs work, and there is work in the backlog, currently unscheduled. We want to make the VoIP experience a bit more rounded, so we want remote players to not just hear the voice of the player that they're hearing. We want them to hear as if there was a mic in the location of that person, so we're going to pick up more of the surrounding sound. If somebody opens a VoIP call and doesn't say anything, you're going to hear the ships going past them, you're going to hear the ambience of Grim HEX if that's where they're stood, and things like this. So we want to work on that, definitely. We want to work on the way the voices sound as well; we need to do a little bit more tuning on that. The whole experience is growing. We're getting more AIs in a lot of locations and things like that, and that's affecting the mix. And we need to think about the VoIP mix as well, because it's really important that you can hear the people talking to you but not lose all the ambience around you at the same time. So yes, there's work on the way for VoIP.