Q&A covers asteroid and nebula mining, the hangar as player housing, server ping and region, Aurora as starter ship, lifetime insurance, star map scale, TrackIR support. The audio director then explains Foley, footstep surfaces, hangar ambience, surround explosions and Vanduul laser sounds.
Yeah, of course. Anything you can see in the universe nowadays, asteroid belts, rings around planets, things of that nature, nebulas, we're going to have all of that in Star Citizen. And if it's there, we want to put gameplay into it. So, yeah, absolutely. There'll be mining around planets. There'll be mining in asteroid belts. There'll be mining nebulas. There'll be mining all kinds of things. Just mining. There's going to be stuff to do on all the features we put in the Star Citizen universe.
When you gotta go, you gotta go. All right, come on, man, we are not making a game about toilets. The only potty humor you get around here is, well, this show.
Yeah, absolutely. If you think about it, the hangar is your form of housing. It's just that you're going to get it way earlier than you would in normal time. Normally, you'd be getting it when the game comes out or you'd have to buy it in the universe, but we're doing the hangar now. And I got to tell you, Forrest and some of the guys are hard at work, and it's looking stinking amazing, and I can't wait to show it to you. We want to get it just right. We're very particular. We want you guys to see how good it is. So we can't show you too early. We don't want to be letting the cat out of the bag, so to say. So yeah, absolutely. The answer to the question is your housing, your hangar, will be your in-game housing.
TL;DRCross-region play is still being worked out and undecided, with location likely determining nearby players, and the dogfighting module is meant to test how ping affects play.
That's a really good question, and it's something we're still working out. But if you think about it, we are primarily a dogfighting game, so ping is going to matter. So the way we're thinking about it right now is that the proximity of where you are physically located in the world will determine most of the players around you. Because we don't know the effect on dogfighting that a 100 millisecond ping will have, or a 20 millisecond ping. We seem to think the sweet spot is around 50 milliseconds, but guess what? You guys are going to actually help test it out and find out for us. Without you, we would not know. So this is kind of one of the reasons we're doing the dogfighting module, because we can discover these kinds of things. If somebody in Australia wants to play somebody in England, what happens? Can they play, and does the dogfighting work? And is there a way for us to balance it so that everybody can play everybody, or else do we have to localize or centralize around different servers? So that's to be determined, and we're really counting on you guys to help us out.
Well, the Aurora is the starter ship, but that doesn't mean it's cheap. The Aurora comes from Roberts Space Industries, the same company that makes the Constellation. And it's going to be a pretty nice piece of equipment. So don't think of it as cheap. In fact, when you look at it here on the brochure that comes out today, I think you might just change your mind. It is one sweet-looking vehicle.
Well, that's a really good question. We have a lot of questions about lifetime insurance. The way it was, anybody that had been an early pledger got lifetime insurance. We sort of cut that off at the date. And we've been inundated with folks saying, I want lifetime insurance, I want lifetime insurance. We're considering that. Maybe we'll open up a small window before the new site comes up. There might be another way to earn it, let's say. Pay attention to what goes on on the website soon.
Well, that's a good question, but the truth of the matter is, with only 100, 150, whatever we end up getting on launch, and we'll grow from there, it's not going to be like the entire galaxy. Think of it as if you're in the arm of the Milky Way. You might have hundreds of systems right on one of the fringe elements out there. That's kind of where we're going to be. So it'll be spherical, and jump points can connect from system to system, or they might wrap around and connect to another one based on the fiction that we put together. We're not going to create a galaxy, per se. It's going to be more about the star system universe, which will continue to grow. And maybe eventually that becomes a galaxy, if we're still talking about this 10 years from now. Let's hope that happens.
Well, I'm responsible for making sure the audio in the game is top notch. Everything from sound effects to music, actors' voices, character voices, and the way the various audio elements are mixed together.
Yeah, my family are basically either musicians or teachers of music. So I knew a lot of musical theory as I was growing up as a kid, and when it came to starting as a computer programmer, I was the only one who could program the computer to play music. So I naturally was specialized into that.
Foley is a method of mirroring what you see on the screen by physically making the sounds yourself. So you watch a screen and you pick things up and bang them around, or you shuffle your clothes around, or you make footstep noises on the ground without really walking anywhere, and you get real close to the microphone. And that's the standard technique for making character sounds.
Right. It's pretty hard because I'm using a conventional post-production editor to put these sounds together against a recording of the animation editor playing the sounds. But each sound has to be individually separated out and then connected to the correct part of the pilot's body, so as he climbs in it's in the right place in the surround field. It's a lot of work.
I work with the artists to delineate every single panel on the ground in the game, every way you can walk. In fact, even surfaces that you can bump into have the kind of surface type written down, so that if you accidentally walk into the wall, it'll make the right kind of sound.
Exactly. That kind of footfall technology is on all the NPCs walking around the deck as well as your own character. If you're in a multiplayer scenario and you see your teammates standing there, you will hear all of their footsteps from the right place on the loudspeakers. So if someone walks from right to left, you'll hear the sounds go from right to left.
TL;DRThe hangar will carry muffled sounds of other hangars, announcements, and traffic through the walls and door, plus a quiet standby ambience from your own ship, with ship-entry sounds attached later.
Well, in order to give the idea that you're in a really working world, there's a lot of other hangars in addition to your hangar, and you can hear the sounds coming through the walls and through the hangar door that doesn't open, to get you really tantalized. You'll be standing around going, what is that? Is that people arguing on the other side of the door? Is that a ship flying by? Are those forklifts, hoists? What is that public address? It's basically air traffic control, letting people take off and land and that kind of stuff. There will be a lot of those sounds. Inside the hangar you will hear a fairly quiet ambience of your own ship as it kind of ticks over and it's in a standby mode, ready for you to get into it. You may hear some steam vents or whatever's going on.
TL;DRMartin Galway is most looking forward to dogfighting with fully surround explosions, where shrapnel and wreckage fly past you and bodies thud when you bump them.
I think, well, I have a great badass sound setup and I'm really looking forward to being in a dogfight, and I would say hearing shrapnel and pieces of the ship you just blew up fly from front to back as you fly through the explosion cloud. A lot of older games just have an explosion sound. It's kind of a mono wave file. It plays over there; the explosions over there are right in front. But our explosions are going to be fully in surround and full of little shrapnel-y bits that kind of tinkle and fizz. The ship's still on fire, basically. Whatever the remnants are of the ship you just blew up will kind of fly past you if you keep flying on straight through the explosion. So if you bump into a body, it's going to give a thud. There'll be music and lots of other sound effects going on, but it'll be nice to really get visceral with explosions.
You can do the other 25%. It's funny, my friends always seem to be able to recognize my voice. One or two lines here and there, and my voice comes out, and they're like, oh yeah.
TL;DRAlien lasers are made by blending many elements, half mechanical and half sci-fi, to suit the Vanduul's factory-built, non-magical technology, with the 13 layers balanced in volume.
Well, you think about the science fiction and the technology behind the alien lasers. Our Vanduul race is, in my view, fairly understandable technology. They have a lot of metal pieces, moving animation. It looks like they're built in factories. They're not squirted out of some energy field and floating around by some magical energy. It's not magic. It's like a real spaceship that has pieces. There's a lot of mechanism-type feel to it. And at the same time, we want to still have that otherworldly science fiction feel. So I use a bunch of elements that have half a kind of mechanical feel and half that sci-fi, alluding to yesteryear's aliens in some cases. And that's what we've got right now. Let me show you the various elements. I'm not sure how interesting this is going to be, but we'll go through the various sounds. Okay, that's a pretty standard one there.
TL;DRGalway budgets a set amount of time, such as a couple of hours, to blend and time-shift many elements into one mono file, which plays multiple times from the ship's wings.
This particular one is actually scouring through a bunch of sounds and making individual elements, and you kind of allot a budget of time. You say to yourself, I'm going to spend two hours honing this kind of stuff. And you collect a whole bunch of elements together and you substitute, you take them out, you put them in, you bring them in and line them up. And also, if you slide them around in time relative to each other, you can certainly change the character of the sound. Or it can just be a "bah". If everything plays at once in a sharp punch, then that's a different kind of thing to an elongated one that has multiple phases.
Right. That's one of the weapons that you can fit to the Vanduul fighter when you fly that. So there'll be two or more of those sounds playing from each wing of your ship. And missile sounds. You'll hear a lot, because it also repeats quite a bit. So you'll hear a lot of stuff.