The audio team covers flyby mixing, quantum travel sounds, footstep culling, sound occlusion and propagation, spatial audio (Atmos), ship computer voices and AI-generated background chatter. They also discuss planned alarms, a ship PA, a sound-sim module and storm audio. Pandemic remote work comes up too.
TL;DRThe flyby sounds are not gone, only mixed differently, and the speaker thinks better mixing and ducking should allow both the old overhead experience and clearer distant-ship cues.
They're not gone. No, they're not gone. They're just mixed differently. They never went away. I've seen the video that people always show, they're like, when are these ones coming back? I've seen that video around, and those sounds are actually still in there. They're just mixed differently. But the difference is, back then, we didn't really play anything in the build-up to the pass-by sound. And it was just, the ship would go overhead, and then the pass-by one-shot we play in isolation. Now we play a lot more stuff on the approach for distant ships and atmosphere, all this kind of stuff. So I guess the problem is that I'm not saying we haven't lost something in this transition, but I think we just need to mix it better so that when there is a ship flying directly overhead, you do still get that same experience that you used to. But I think from a gameplay point of view, it's better at the moment because you can actually tell where a distant ship is and if it's coming towards you or not. Whereas before that was a lot harder.
Because it was overwhelming before. Yeah, there's a bit of a cinematic element that's maybe been lost slightly because we're trying to tell the player more about what's happening in the ships in the area. But yeah, it's always that balance between the two.
So would you say it's something worth looking into without committing to one action one way or the other? Because even just looking in the chat right now, there are some folks who like it, and it's an improvement, and there are some folks who are like, no, we want the old sounds back. So you're knowing there's no way to please all people all the time. Is this something worth at least taking a look at?
It should be possible to get both. It should be possible with the proper mix and the proper ducking of things and the context, we should be able to get it so that if it is one of those situations where it's directly overhead and really close, you do get the old experience, but in the situations that benefit from what we were talking about, where you can hear them more clearly at distance and that kind of thing, then we can have that. It should be possible.
TL;DRYes, NPC chatter and ambient life content is already recorded, but it will arrive later as the new AI system matures, along with a planned dynamic background murmur called walla.
Yes. The answer to this question is yes. You will expect these to happen. We've actually recorded a lot of this content already. There's a ton of content that is meant to go in that covers this life aspect of our game. The hard part really is that we've decided to take a really huge undertaking with our behavior in our AI and created this new system called Subsumption. And it is where we want to do these amazing things with it, but we need to learn to crawl before we run and fly. So there's a lot of the basics that we're really working out with the AI. And so the player interactions are obviously first and foremost. So the life element is definitely considered. Don't worry about that. We've recorded a lot for it. But it's going to be coming in a bit later. So definitely expect it as the AI matures and we can get more of that in. You will see that come in. Also, I wanted to add, this talks about actual real NPCs talking together and things like that. We also do want to add a layer, and you see this a lot in film as well, where there's just a bit of a murmur, this kind of background. It's more of actually an ambiance in a background. It's called walla, and it's very indiscernible. And we really want to add this into our game as well, but we want to do it a bit educationally, considering the fact that this is a live world with not just a bunch of NPCs running around, but also a lot of live players. And we want to actually dynamically change walla depending on the volume and occupancy and things that are going on in the rooms. And so that also is a huge undertaking that we're looking to do. And you will see more of that start to kind of trickle in. This is all under consideration, don't worry.
TL;DRShip audio depends on messages from other game systems that audio doesn't always receive, so the team digs into code; event-based mixing and sound transfer through metal are planned but a long way off.
A lot of what we do is built on all of the tech in the game. So as a starting point, somebody's designed a ship and there are a lot of systems that all hang together to make that ship reliable. And then our system kind of sits on the end, kind of representing all those systems in audio form. And very often there are certain little angles here and there that need to be dealt with that aren't so noticeable from any other point of view than audio, because as long as the ship moves when you press go, it's cool, right? From an audio perspective, we don't always get the messages we want, so we end up digging into the code and finding out where those messages have gone. With these systems, we're looking to improve all of this stuff. Again, the mix thing comes into it as well. I think we've got a lot of tech in the pipeline to improve the ability to mix based on events, which is something we don't really have right now. That's quite a long way down the schedule, but it's going to come eventually and we're going to have a lot more ability to do more emergent things with the mix, because it's one thing providing the sound for the spaceship starting up, but it's another thing being able to make that take center stage. Additionally to that, we're also looking to improve the way that sounds transfer from physical media that maybe isn't necessarily air. So if you fire up some loud thrusters on the outside of a ship, you want to hear a lot of metal rattles and things like that. And we have systems designed but not yet developed to allow that.
TL;DRShip hazard alarms would originate with system design, which builds the alarm system first; audio would then be asked to create distinct sounds that make different alarms recognisable.
We'll make the sound for it if it's something Design want to do. It's not an audio-driven feature really, but we'll make it sound really cool when that's asked for.
That's actually an interesting point. Obviously, the question would seem like it's an audio question because it's a sound that folks would hear. That would be the final deliverable. But the actual origin of a feature like this would actually come from system design, where the system designers have to actually create a multiple alarm system in the ship with different lights and the triggering mechanism and display panels like this. When that stuff is done, then they would come to audio as sort of a client of theirs and be like, okay, now we need three different sounds and stuff like that. So while it seems like it's something that would originate with audio, it actually doesn't. It comes from system designers.
Our job would be more like to say we need these different sounds to differentiate different kinds of alarms, and our job would be to design that language to be able to quickly tell what's happening.
TL;DRQuantum travel entry and exit sounds will be improved at some point; known bugs, including missing sounds of other players' jumps, remain, and a fix for the exit sound is hoped for soon.
Yes, we'll improve them at some point. We did a rework of them like a year ago, I think. That improved them quite a lot, but there's definitely still a lot of work to do. And I think there's a few bugs in there as well. That means we're not getting the sounds of other people entering and exiting quantum travel, which obviously is something really cool and something you want. It's quite an interesting challenge with our QT mechanic because they mentioned Star Wars and Star Trek. The Star Trek warp jump is like the ship's stationary and it's an instant into the warp bubble. Same with the Star Wars hyperspace jump, it's pretty much ship's stationary or moving at the speed it was and then space starts to distort and you're in, whereas ours there's a long sort of ramp-up where the ship's going very fast but isn't yet in the tunnel. It needs a bit of a different treatment.
I'll hold my hand up here and say, the quantum travel exit sound, I've got a bug on me for that. So hopefully that'll be improved soon once I've fixed that bug.
It also points out, it's similar to the ship startup sounds. There's the problems with the different perspectives that people have on the ships. Are you in the ship coming out of quantum travel? Are you on a space station while another ship comes in off quantum travel to where you are? And then what if 50 ships all exit quantum travel around you in the same place at the same time? There's systems that we need to deal with, things like that.
TL;DRNot a plan: the team shares anecdotes, such as a stretched bass drum for rumble, recorded electromagnetic interference, and a squeaky dolphin sound used in a ship toilet, plus an interesting alien voice recording.
I've certainly been aware of someone who added rumble to a sound effect by taking a bass drum from one of their favourite heavy metal bands and just stretching it out with a fairly well-known tool called Paulstretch, and they sort of just wanted elements of things they were fans of. I'm not going to name who it was or what the song was because we could be sued. No, we couldn't. That was one example. Certainly, recording electronic interference, that was something that we've done quite a lot of. We have quite a big library of that. I don't know how much of that you use, Josh.
Yeah, I've recorded quite a lot of that stuff myself that I think we all use in a lot of UI sounds. It's like a telephone coil mic and it picks up all the electromagnetic radiation from things. There's a lot of that in the game. There's a dolphin in the Vanguard toilet. There's a seal in the Argo MOLE toilet.
I will say, one of the most interesting actors I did get to record was for this project, actually. That's why I wasn't sure what's been announced. But it was for Squadron, and it was for one of our aliens. Just a really amazing voice. Deep voice, and just the things he was doing with his voice.
TL;DRThe team would like ship-wide PA speakers but gives no date; it needs UI for player interaction and PA speaker structure on every ship, and Jared says it may not be top priority.
This one, actually, I really like this question because my gamer geek is coming out and going, yes! Because I've actually been wanting this for a while. Ever since we really kind of got the FOIP going, and even a little bit before that, when we were trying to really have the ability for a player to be, for example, if an NPC is talking on a comms and you're sitting in the room with them, you're going to hear the dry signal of him talking into the comms. But then if, let's say, the comms is to the hangar down below, you also hear it coming out of the PA and into the speaker array below. So if the NPC can do it, surely the player can do it too. We would like to get to that point. There will be a point. I think that maybe the bottleneck that's kind of stopping us there is we need to talk with UI and get at least a way for a player to actually interact with the PA, obviously. And then we also need to work out, because every ship will need to have that PA structure, speakers or the entities and all that stuff to kind of outline what the ship is. Especially with our bigger capital ships. I mean, they're like little floating cities, right? We want to be able to isolate different rooms. If you are really a captain and you want to be able to talk to your engineering, click on the engineering button, go talk to, Scotty, I need more power.
It's also hard because through the voice channels, there's already a ship-wide voice channel, but it's not a PA system in the ship. It is a voice channel through comms and everything. I think what this question is really touching on is that sense that it comes through positional audio in the ship. If you're closer to the speaker, you'd hear it louder. If you're farther from the speaker, you're gone. For me, my favorite ship's the Genesis Starliner, and I absolutely need to be able to do a 'this is your captain speaking' from the front, or I don't even know why I would fly it. So I'm with you on this one, Bob. And it's different than the current in-game comms that are there. But at the same time, because that serves somewhat of that purpose already, this might not be the highest priority.
It's using the same tech, too. I mean, that's the big part of it. It's using that same tech where a character is speaking into a mic that's being transmitted, and then comes out of a speaker, whether the speaker is your headset, your comm, or the speaker is a PA in a room. It's utilizing the same technology there. So we had to first work on that and get that hammered out. And then now we can work on how do we get it into the hands of the players, through FOIP and things like that.
TL;DRNo sonic boom exists yet; it raises questions about simulating the speed of sound and atmospheric density, but the team would consider it and says everyone wants it, with no commitment.
So we have talked about this previously and there are a few barriers to this. Mach 1 is different depending on atmospheric pressures and the type of planet that you're on. It opens up a lot of questions, but the biggest issue that it opens up is the question of whether you simulate the speed of sound. As in, when you see an explosion in the distance, do you hear it seconds later? Which apparently isn't the case. And it isn't the case because for gameplay reasons, it's much more important that you know what's going on actually now. And this is, again, the important thing is that it's fun to play. There is a little bit of vary there. If you go down the route of talking about sonic booms, that implies that there is a speed of sound representation too. But that's not necessarily the case, I guess. We could say at a certain speed, as a function of what the atmospheric density is, we could maybe provide a sonic boom sound in atmosphere. We haven't done it yet, but because it comes up so often, I think we would definitely consider it. What was the phrase? We will consider planning to think about it.
It is the question that comes up every single time we do a show with the audio team. It is the most consistent question; it has been there in the first episode, it will be there in the last episode until it actually happens. It's very much a community-desired effect, but I'm just going to paraphrase every version of the answer that we've gotten over the years. The biggest thing, as you said, was the atmospheric density. It's different on every planet. It's still being developed in every planet. They're still being adjusted. The speeds of the craft are still being adjusted. Folks are about to learn about all the atmospheric flight changes coming in Alpha 3.10, with changes to speeds and stuff like that. There's so much that needs to be considered before we get there. I don't think there's anybody that doesn't want it. It's just a question of whether it's a reasonable amount of work or request at this point.
There's a major visual and physical effect it has as well. If thin plates of glass aren't smashing under the pressure wave and things like that, if trees aren't bending because of them, then it isn't just audio. There's an impulse thing going on as well.
If we're going to do it, we're going to do it. But yeah, I think the short answer is everybody here wants it just as much as the folks out there want it.
TL;DRA sound-sim knockout is something the team wants, but it hasn't been worked on much lately; it needs creative direction for sound-sim-off, a physical component from the vehicle team, and balancing.
We don't work on this as much as we'd like lately, unfortunately, but it's definitely something we all want to do. I always think the coolest thing we could do would be you're in a dogfight and you can hear everything crystal clear, you can hear where all the enemy ships are, you can hear your ship, what it's doing, and then all of a sudden you take an unexpected huge hit and it happens to knock out your sound sim module and suddenly everything just folds down to just you in the little cockpit and you just hear everything that is in the cockpit or you're sat on, basically. And then after a few more seconds, it slowly comes back up and you're back to the full soundscape. But for that four or five seconds, it's just you in the little cockpit in space. That would just be the coolest thing. The sound of the ships now is pretty much what we'd imagine sound sim on to sound like. So everything and all the stuff to do with ship sounds and ship combat sounds is pretty much sound sim on at the moment. We still need to creatively decide what the creative direction is for sound sim off. How far do we take it? What should it sound like? And then, to be honest, that's kind of the biggest barrier at the moment.
And then, of course, it needs to be physicalized into a component, which is actually something on the vehicle team. And then those game systems attach to that and then make it puncturable, damageable through external stuff.
There's game balancing considerations as well. We need to adjudicate how much the sound helps you in a dogfight. I hope it does. And then we need to make sure that the impact of having it disabled isn't so great that it actually is a serious disadvantage. Or maybe we want that. I don't know. But that needs to be taken into consideration as well.
It's similar to how accessibility is handled in computer games. You can have arrows telling you which direction certain sounds are coming from if people are deaf, but if you switch that on and you can hear, then it turns the audio off. So you can't have both. I think this is similar to that.
The short answer there is they're being culled too aggressively by the code system. We have to set a limit on them because they're quite a surprisingly expensive part of what we do on the CPU. And we need to limit how many players query the terrain to decide which footstep to play. But that said, we have lots of tech in the pipeline that's going to improve the way that we cull, make it more intelligent culling, because right now it's aggressive, but not very intelligent. I agree with the question. I think we don't hear enough of the AI's footsteps and we are looking at improving that. I have about three or four tasks on me related to improving that.
TL;DRNot necessarily more detail: footstep tech and bespoke sounds per surface already exist, so if they feel generic the team will rework them, then aim to add finer variation like resonance on metal sheets.
Not necessarily. So we currently have quite a lot of tech available which describes the surface that we're walking on. We can know the physical properties of it, we can know the render properties of it, and we can relay that to the sound system and play different audio triggers based on what you're walking on. What we think is happening with this question is that maybe the detail is not coming through, because we do have bespoke sounds for all the different surface types. So I think if people are feeling that they're all sounding very generic, then we're going to look at that and rework it and make sure that the differentiation is really there, because the tech is certainly there to support it. But then beyond that, we also want to improve the options that we have beyond just surface type, material type, physical properties to go to. So for example, if you walk on a metal sheet, it will resonate much more in the centre than it will towards the edges, because they're screwed down to a physical frame or something like that. So that's our next step for improving the way that footsteps vary, because varying footsteps is a really important thing. You hear them all the time and if they always sound the same, it gets fatiguing. So we know how important this is and we do spend a lot of time on footsteps.
TL;DRGraham agrees games lack a director to focus the mix, and says a system to judge what matters most by game context is being worked on, but it is a long way down the line.
You make a really good point there, Jared, as well. Because in games, we don't have a director. A director can sit there and look at a scene and say, I want to hear that, that, and that. I want the focus to be on that. And I don't want to hear anything else. You'll notice that when you're watching a movie, there are so many things that are seen but not heard. So one of the systems we're working on, which is way down the line, is a system to kind of understand what the most important things in a scene are, depending on the game context. So a particular scene will sound very different if you're chasing someone on foot and trying to get a bounty reward or something, compared with if you're ambiently idling through the same area. Hopefully, we'll be able to make a system where you can get a very different mix in very similar circumstances.
TL;DR5.1 and 7.1 are already supported, and spatial formats like Atmos are being looked at, but the team still has to work out how to use height channels and handle delivery and authoring.
5.1 and 7.1 are already [supported]. Spatial, it's really interesting and we're looking at it a lot. We need to work out exactly how we're going to use it, because the height channels, are we going to use them all the time or are we only going to use them in certain contexts when we want the height there? Obviously, without the height channels, you should still know to a certain degree whether it's coming from above you or below you. So things like spatial sound are going to help with that, but it shouldn't be the only way of conveying that. But yeah, it is really exciting. And I'm more excited personally about spatial sound than I am going from stereo to surround.
Well, they used to sell surround as 3D audio, right? But it's not. It's a 2D plane. So now 3D audio is actually 3D for the first time. That's cool. But for our game, our game is six degrees of freedom. Up is wherever we want up to be, right? So being limited to a flat plane of audio speakers is a limiting factor for us. So we're absolutely looking at Atmos, because it will potentially do a lot for us. Not just Atmos, other 3D sound systems are available.
Yeah, we definitely need to improve those, but I would be hesitant to put too much work into it until it behaves the way it's supposed to, the final version of how ships interact with the ground and other objects. There's only so much you can do with audio too.
We don't want to fake anything, basically, because the whole philosophy of this game is to simulate everything. And if we're simulating crumple, then we'll sonify crumple. And if we're simulating ships scraping on the ground, then we'll sonify that. But right now they're not. So we need that there to offer us those possibilities.
TL;DRTentatively yes: distant storm sounds would likely follow if there's a distant visual effect, since current weather sounds only play once you're inside it, and supporting tech is months away.
A lot of it comes down to whether there's a visual effect at distance, because that's what we will generally sort of bang our audio on. If there's a distant visual effect, then yes, we can absolutely telegraph an approaching storm, and I would like to think there would be, so I'm going to say tentatively, yes, we would be doing that.
[We have] sounds for all of the different weather that we have right now, all of the snow on microTech and stuff, but it has to have already reached you before you get it, because it's based off if you're inside of the zone of the weather. That would be a nice addition to it.
Certainly, we're working on tech that kind of helps us to do things like crowding distant sounds, allowing us to express a distant collection of sounds as a single sound and that kind of thing. So there's potentially a lot of tech that's, again, down the line, months down the line, that we could use to achieve that sort of thing.
TL;DRAtmosphere already sounds different from space thanks to environment feedback for air and weather, but older ships with dense, broadband sound design mask it, and some ships still need revisiting at some point.
Yeah, there's definitely a difference. In space, you've just got the sound of the, we call them ship-wide audio objects, like the sounds of the cockpit kind of whining and humming and all the thrusters on your ship. Actually, you've also got vibration in space, but you don't really hear that unless your ship's quite damaged. And then when you enter atmosphere, we bring in what we call environment feedback. So this is the sound of the air rushing over the frame of the ship. And that's reactive to how dense the atmosphere is, how fast the ship's going, all that kind of stuff. And the environment feedback also governs, if you're flying through a snowstorm, you should hear the hail on the windscreen. So we do have that, and if you're on the ground looking up at a ship flying in atmosphere, then it's also different. You get the sort of distant diffuse sound of the ship ripping through the air. If you hear a pass-by in space, it sounds a lot different, a lot more muffled. I think it really depends at the moment what ship you're flying in atmosphere as to how much difference you hear, because a lot of the ships that haven't had an audio pass in a long time have this kind of really, really broadband sound design aesthetic to them. Everything's really washy and covers the whole frequency spectrum. It doesn't leave much room for the slightly more simple sounds of wind and hail hitting the windscreen and stuff. But some of the ships we've given a pass recently, it caused quite a stir, the Cutlass Black, for us to redesign. And a few of the more modern ones like the Carrack and the Banu Defender, they have far less mid-frequency content in the actual ship sound, more bottom end and top end, which frees up the mids, so you hear a lot more of the vibration and all of the weather sound and wind sound against the ship. Hopefully that's the plan.
So it sounds like a lot of the sound design for the ships is individual to each ship. And what you're saying is that newer ships have newer tech, newer techniques, newer features, and maybe some of the older ones could probably stand to get a little more attention.
It's like the phrase painting the Humber Bridge. You keep painting a bridge, you get to the other end, and when you finish painting it, you've got to go back to the other end and start again. The number of ships that we have.
TL;DRAudio doesn't currently provide concept sounds; concept artists have the final say, and there's no creature pipeline yet, with who makes creature sounds still to be worked out, though collaboration is hoped for.
That's an interesting question. I mean, honest answer, this is new ground for us. So I think concept artists do have the final say over what's going to happen to the concept. So we don't tend to input to that. And I think that makes sense because the visual really does drive what you think a creature is going to sound like.
It would be really interesting, though, to think about how a future space creature could vocalize, and whether there were any physiological specialities to it that mean maybe it's got a huge trumpet or something and it might sound trumpety.
Of course, being able to communicate in vacuum if it's the whale, or on a planet with thinner atmospheres like that. I do want to stress, this is obviously referring to the ISC that aired, I think it was a week ago now. We are at the beginning of developing this pipeline right now. Right now it is characters, but part of what's going to happen over the next several months and maybe even longer is that characters will get together with tech animation, we'll get together with the actor status team, we'll get together with all these other groups and figure out how to make them, because we do not have a pipeline for making creatures. We haven't made creatures yet. So we have to figure out what this new pipeline is and what we can take from the other pipelines that we've built and what needs to be created bespoke. Just on this, who makes the sounds? Does the sound of a creature fall under dialogue? Is that going to be Bob going out there and recording different animals to combine it? Or is it going to be the realm of a tech designer who's got to go out there and simulate something from scratch? Those are the kind of things that we still need to figure out as we build that pipeline up. Me, personally, I'm hoping that we send Bob into as many dangerous areas as possible with a microphone.
I would like to say, though, it does cover very similar ground when we consider behavior and how, as a dialogue team, we do chime back and work with design and narrative on the behavior templates and things like that. So I would like to think we would have at least some collaboration there to figure out what they would do, how they would go about their day, attacking, hunting, or just milling about. So those things really, the behavior and the sounds, those really go hand in hand. I would like to see that this becomes a collaboration just like it has been with dialogue.
TL;DRThe team moved to working from home quickly and keeps producing quality content using software and headphones, though performance capture is on hold while remote voiceover sessions continue.
Well, firstly, I would like to give a hats off to CIG, because as I've seen a lot of other companies and a lot of industries and different companies from friends and family and other colleagues, CIG, we transitioned in like a week. It was just simple, easy peasy. Everyone went home and stayed home and stayed safe and saved lives.
Not to say there weren't issues, but it was easier than I think we anticipated. There are still issues and we covered those in ISC with the data transfer rates and stuff like that.
But also, this is a very good question specifically for our team because, being audio professionals, we really do rely heavily on our offices and our sound pods to be able to effectively do our work. And so it's been just really, it's like one of those things where you don't know you could do something unless you go out and actually do it. And I didn't know that we would be able to do this until we just went home and just did it. And we've worked around the solutions, a lot of issues with our rooms, like everyone's different room. We've been solving it through software and having to work on headphones a lot and things like that, and just making it work and still churning out really good high quality content. So just hats off to the team for everyone working really hard and just making it happen. As far as dialogue stuff goes, obviously we've had to put a hold on any performance capture, things that require a group of people working together in a shared confined space, right? But we have been carrying on VO sessions. We did record some Theaters of War dialogue where it was actually quite astonishing to have our director and myself and the studio and then the artists all in different locations working together, listening at the same time around the globe, putting together, recording some dialogue. And also, we did do some office talent. So I don't know if maybe you might recognize Phil and Darren's voice in the Fleet Week PA and adverts and stuff. So there's a little bit of in-house stuff going there.
TL;DRYes, in principle: the team is working on a big, unannounced shift using text-to-speech driven by actors to give ship computers more voices and lines, but they can't say more yet.
Yes. We actually have been doing a really big think on ship design. I can't say too much yet because it's going to be a pretty monumental shift. But one of the things that we've really been finding difficult is we have a lot of manufacturers, right? And if you consider each one being an actor that we cast, and we go and record, let's say, for example, just eight, ten actors, and we want to incrementally improve our ship computers, then we want to go back and pick these guys up and record five more lines for 10 different people, the costs rack up rather quickly and it's just astronomical. It's not something that's really feasible and achievable really. So we've been really trying to look hard, and looking at this for a long time, at just very humanistic voices that we can actually go and capture an actor and drive their voice with text-to-speech, to be able to create a lot more computer voices, a lot more things that they can say, a lot more reasons for them to exist than just being your Bitching Betty. Am I allowed to say that? That's the idea, though. We want to step away from that. I know there's some lore in there that we don't have AI, as far as that think-for-yourself kind of computer, but that doesn't mean that they can't be fun and engaging and help you with your missions or the type of style of gameplay that you like to do. There's a lot that I would like to talk about, but I just don't want to hint too much at it. But the idea is there. We know we have a problem to solve, and it's in the pipeline.
TL;DRThe current mission-giver dialogue is a first-pass, base-level implementation with at least one variation to prove the interaction, and more recorded content is expected to be added and iterated on as the AI matures.
Yes. Yes, please. This has frustrated me for a little while, but I completely understand it. As I mentioned before with the background voices and things like that, Subsumption, AI, we really have to learn to crawl and do the basics. And that's the same with the mission givers. These are first passes of the mission givers, trying to proof out the concept of them and how the player should interact with them. We have recorded a lot of this content. There's so much content. I would say this much content, and maybe this much of it has animation in the game, and maybe this much has behavior put to it. There's a lot of stuff in there. We're just trying to get at least one variation in there just to prove that this interaction works. Then we can go in and really engage it. We predicted a lot, but that's not to say that there's not a lot of holes or things missing. We don't know yet because we're putting it together, we're getting it in there. And then we can look at what the game experience is and then iterate it, make it better, take the feedback from you guys, from our team, the playtests, how we all do it. We iterate, iterate, iterate. And that's kind of the concept here. So what you guys are seeing is a base level implementation. Once the AI matures and things get better, don't worry, we have replayability in mind. So it will get better, don't worry.
TL;DRSound occlusion is being scheduled for the next quarter and should become much more systemic, letting players tell where a sound is actually heard from, though how long it takes depends on the work.
I've just been scheduling some work for the next quarter, and the way occlusion is working is going to change massively as part of that. I have some work that I've done that enables audio to propagate correctly through portals and through rooms and things like that, and to accumulate reverbs as it goes through them and that kind of thing. But it's been kind of on a little stumbling block where we need some extra tech in the game's room system. So for a while we were kind of trying to figure out how that's going to schedule in, and we've decided that, rather than waiting on it any longer, I'm going to do this work, which isn't strictly audio work, but it's stuff that benefits us greatly. So it's getting scheduled in right now, and occlusion will be much more systemic and will make a lot more sense than it currently does. So you'll be able to get a lot more of a sense not just of the direction, as the crow flies, that sound is coming from, but where you're actually hearing it from, and you'd be able to follow that sound and find the objects making that sound or the actor that's making that sound. So it's coming, and it's just a case of how long it takes me to do it.
The Atmos thing is a good opportunity to test out how this works. It may be a good sort of first use case for that sort of thing. We have all the information we need. It's just a case of how do we express it in a way that's easily understood by the player.
TL;DRYes, background radio chatter such as ATC and other announcements is planned and in their thinking, using text-rendered voices, but it will come when the needed systems are available.
Oh yeah, that just goes back to the previous talking points there. We really want you to feel that you can hear other people use the ATC, that when you approach your landing zone, you're hearing other chatter with the ATC. We also want to throw in, and this goes back to needing these real humanistic voices to be able to produce this much amount of content, because these kind of things, these background chatters and being able to list out weather or what the law system is on a certain planet or just things going on, current events or things like that, that all needs to be done with a voice that can be rendered from text, so that we're not constantly recording assets. And that's all I do every day, is record assets. But yes, the answer is yes, there will be. There's going to be a lot of that coming around when the systems are available, but it's definitely in our thoughts and our plans.
I think for dialogue, I can say real quick, iZotope is amazing. We love that piece of gear. And also in sound design, we use that in a lot of places. It's a great way to clean up and make things sound nice and pristine and beautiful.
And to go artsy-fartsy about it, genuinely thinking about why we're doing things rather than how we're doing things is, I'd say, more important than any technology or anything like that.
I'm really looking forward to the propagation stuff that Graham's working on. That will be really, really exciting. A lot of problems we have now will hopefully just fall away, but then it'll unlock a lot of creative stuff. It's not sound design, but it's audio.