The audio team discusses bringing back ship flyby sounds, the Star Audio middleware, realistic audio mode, and VoIP back-end limits. They also cover foley and footstep fixes, ship horns, radio stations, ATC dialogue, damage alarms and vibration, sirens, and doubling the audio department.
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.
TL;DRRealistic audio mode isn't in the schedule yet because every sound must be treated and ships come first; it should reach players at some point, but no dates are promised.
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.
TL;DRSimon Gershon wants a cinematic, immersive sound where ships rock and vibrate, including something beyond Atmos, but he avoids rash promises and won't detail the systems being developed.
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.
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;DRThe audio team would love to add radio stations, perhaps location-specific, and the studio has wanted them for years, but finding resources and a way to implement them is still an open challenge.
You know, I was talking about this yesterday. Yes, I would love to have radio stations in. And that's what I'd like to do. Maybe radio stations which are exclusive to certain planets, and when you fly away from the planet, you don't receive that transmission. Maybe when you fly to a colony somewhere, you get a slightly different style of radio station. All manner of things: radio, music, narrative, adverts, shipping forecasts, how much rocks cost.
I feel like maybe two or three months ago, there was a backer who basically invented like an hour-long string of what a Star Citizen radio station would be like. They used AI. It was trucker music and everything. And I don't want to turn this into a conversation about AI because I despise AI with a fiery passion of 10,000 suns. But it was rather compelling to listen to for a while. And so it's going to be an interesting challenge finding resources and figuring out how to implement that. But there's no secret. We've talked about it for years. It's something we want. It's something Chris wants. So finding a way to make that happen will be interesting.
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;DRThe team wants an announcement system, including outside the ship, and it is built into the VoIP design, but it needs VoIP back-end rework first, which is straining under high player counts.
Got to have it. As it stands, the VoIP system is creaking a little bit under the pressure of how heavily we've pushed the player cap on our servers. So we need to do some rework there. But I think this goes back to the ship horns question as well, because we've talked in the past about being able to make announcements outside of the ship. So you could approach some other players on a planet surface and you could just switch on the mic and just let them know that they're in some trouble or whatever. You do all that kind of thing. And this is all built into the design of VoIP, but we need some back-end work too.
Also, we will be introducing an element of vibration to the ship. So whenever there's damage, you will feel it as well as hear it, as well as an audible signal or an alarm system. So there will be all sensors aware.
Yeah, well, as I just alluded to, we have back-end issues there. They are on the list to be looked at. I don't know when they're going to be scheduled in, but this is all work for our team over at Turbulent in Canada to look at, because the VoIP back end was designed in a time when we had 50-player server caps, and now we have 500-player server caps. So that system hasn't grown.
TL;DRVoIP needs a back-end rework, handled by the Canadian team, to cope with higher player counts and work across shards; server meshing made existing inconsistency worse, with an update promised in an upcoming show.
So what needs to happen is a rework of the back end so that it can handle these hugely elevated player counts. We also want to be able to communicate cross-shard, so it basically needs to become completely independent of servers and shards, and it needs to be running in its own back end entirely, so that anyone can communicate with anyone. That is all work that I'm not going to be part of and not familiar with. So it's very much, as I say, our team in Canada. But once they've done that, then the hookup on the game side is not much different to how it is now. So as you know, when it works, you're able to communicate with each other, but it is inconsistent, and it's inconsistent because of this back-end issue.
It was struggling before the advent of server meshing. When server meshing came out, it's not quite the bullet in the head of Old Yeller, but it's really exacerbated the issue. Benoit is due to come back on in a couple weeks and do a big update to that show we did in February where we talk about all the technical features, and we'll have an update on the work for VoIP and FOIP there.
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;DRSimon Gershon describes three concurrent streams: new material at a high standard, polishing or replacing legacy content, and building closer engagement with the community, whose feedback he invites.
Yeah, there are three stages and they're all running concurrently. My remit is to work on the material right now and get that out at a very, very high standard. And that's stream one, if you like, between now and X. And the other one, going parallel to that, below it, is the legacy stuff. Legacy sometimes is a dirty word. It's just what exists now. We're going to elevate that. I've got to run and see what's good and bad in that, that I would like to keep and change and adapt. And that will become part of the top stream. And the other stream, which is vitally important to me, is the community I build here, but also the relationship which needs to be built further with people out there, the fans. I need to hear from you, and you're part of the third strand. So it's important to me at the top layer that we're doing very, very high standard stuff from now onwards. Number two is addressing the legacy stuff like this. It sounds like we're picking at a scab all the time, the legacy. It's stuff that exists that needs to be polished and cleaned and then join the top layers. Some of it is old. It's 10 years old. It's like driving an old 10-year-old car. Some of it may need to be jettisoned. It's not necessarily bad. It's just dated bad. And then the third thing, which is the way we're going to work together: we're going to be a large department, but I want to hear from people about what we're doing right or wrong. I invite it, and I will be engaging more with the community, because for me that's really part of developing a game and developing a soundtrack.
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.
Yeah. Everything's going to be addressed. The weight of everything, the weight of objects is going to be addressed. The way we react with anything in the world, in the game world, is going to be changed so that it feels real. Obviously, and stylized within the framework of a game. Yes, that will be addressed.
Yeah, I think that's an extreme example. But when Simon first came in, he gave a demonstration of the kind of things he would want to do to the sounds of Star Citizen. And it was absolutely amazing. But the one word that I think I would take away from it was weight. It was like giving all the doors weight, all the ships weight, just giving the whole game more audible weight and making things feel more real through the game.
TL;DRAudio coming last is an inevitable consequence of visuals coming first, not unique to this company; the team can't change it, so it works alongside other departments and runs at the last minute.
There's an inevitability to that sound. It's not exclusive to this company, not exclusive to this style of creativity. It happens a lot because our visual intelligence is far greater than our sonic intelligence. And what we see first always comes first. And traditionally, the visual element of any creative product generally comes first. And now how do we deal with it being at the end? Well, we just have to deal with it. It's unfortunate, but we don't start a game with the sound. We start a game with the vision, with the visuals rather. And we're just at that stage and we just work alongside each other. And we're going to be working alongside each other much more, the different departments, so that we can be organic together. It is unfortunate, but that's what happens. We can't really change that, and it's stressful and we have to run at the 11th hour, but that's unfortunately what happens.
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;DRStar Audio is the tech between game systems and Wwise, letting sound designers add context and pass events through hierarchies, while realistic mode is one use of it based on audio pressure between source and listener.
It might be easier to list the overlaps, because they're very different things. So Star Audio is effectively a kind of middleware replacement. It's not going to replace Wwise, which we will always use, at least for the time being, to play back our sounds, but it's a replacement for the glue between game systems and the audio system that then allows a lot more freedom to sound designers to do whatever they want. So where existing ways of hooking sounds up to things are quite prescriptive, you might look at an animation and say, I want this animation to play this exact sound from the library. What Star Audio does is it allows you to basically just flag the fact that the animation is played and leave the decision on what the sound does down to the sound designer, and they can then make that contextual if they want. They can add logic, they can do all kinds of different things. We can also do things like passing events down hierarchies at runtime. So I always use this example, but if somebody's holding a weapon on the hip and they're piloting a ship and the ship gets hit by a missile, we can make the gun on the hip rattle because the ship got hit, because there's a hierarchy that's being tracked at runtime, which we never had before with the old systems. So there's a lot more contextual information available to all the sounds. And the realistic mode is kind of a subset of that, a microcosm of that whole ecosystem, which is basically listening to whether there's any audio pressure between the listening device of the ears and the sound emission device, which may be a ship or a weapon or whatever. So the realistic mode is a sort of first use of what Star Audio does, or it's a high use of what Star Audio does. But it's got much more aesthetic presence, I think, to the player, which is why I think it's something that people are very interested in. But Star Audio is the tech behind that thing.
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.
So right now it's fully automatic, based on what your PC is set to, effectively. We have some reports that that doesn't work, and in development now we have the ability to just choose what you want from a drop-down menu, and I think it just needs an integration, so it should be something we can get into the next release.
Good question. Yes, absolutely. We're going to replace as much Foley as I see fit. I want it to have weight, correct resonance, the correct surface, the correct sole. And yes, that is a definite. That's one of the systems, like I said, I'll be looking at.
This issue is compounded by a bug that I happened to fix just the other week in a development stream, where the materials weren't being picked up correctly from the render mesh. So we are now probing the render mesh correctly. We know what material we're on. That fix will be coming in an upcoming release.
But because I'm here, it'll be coming quite quickly. So you won't have your feet sounding like you're walking on a piece of cheese when it's not cheese, it's metal.
We did it years ago. I don't think they play anymore, but you have that classic Star Trek thing where you set the self-destruct and you've got 'this ship will self-destruct in...', although we don't make them wait like five minutes to self-destruct their ship, so an audio alarm for that is going to be pretty quick.
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.