Audio designers and a programmer discuss audio propagation tech for pressure, walls and canyons, component and damage sounds on ships, cockpit warnings, and surround support. They also cover VoIP effects, breathing sets, and ideas like ship loudspeakers and elevator chimes.
TL;DRJosh Bell says the plan is for components like power plants and life support to make sounds reflecting their condition, so players can judge their state by ear, as ship damage already affects sound.
Yeah, that's definitely the plan. We don't attach sound to any components other than thrusters and the quantum drive and stuff at the moment, but as we start to add sound to power plants and life support and avionics and all that kind of stuff, they definitely will make sound from the location where the component is and based on the condition of the component and all that kind of stuff, its degradation level, how much it's powered on. All that kind of stuff will definitely have sounds coming from those locations, so you'll be able to tell roughly the state of it based off the sound. We already kind of do this at the moment just based on the ship's overall health. So all of the movement sounds on the ship and even the ambience of the ship now change based on how damaged the ship is, and we also turn off the vibrations when the ship is more damaged, which is cool. That was a relatively recent addition, I think. Maybe 3.6.
TL;DRShip audio is mixed first for the pilot's seat, which is hard to perfect on large ships, so they hope to build per-role mixes once multi-crew roles are more solid.
As default, you start with the first-person perspective. Pilot's seat, you mix for that first. I guess with a single-seater fighter, you'd expect to hear all that stuff from just the pilot's seat, because there's no other perspectives really. But yeah, it's quite a challenge really. First-person pilot's seat, third-person exterior camera is all well and good, but then testing it in a large ship, getting the ship to be flowing while you walk around it and check it sounds good from other rooms can be quite a challenge. You never really get it perfect, it would take too long. We kind of want to have this idea of: think about what the engineer in the engine bay would hear, what the person in the drone bay would hear, what the turret gunner needs to hear, all this kind of stuff. And then when all these multi-crew things are more solidified, we've got a list of roles, and think of an audio mix for each of those roles rather than just each room.
Possibly. I would have to check. They were re-implemented as part of the new flight model quite a while ago, and then I found a problem with them and fixed that a little while ago, and haven't checked them in a while. I know they've generally got a bit quieter, and it takes a bit more of a crazy flight maneuver to trigger the loudest one, and maybe people aren't just getting up to those kind of speeds in atmosphere anymore and we need to readjust for that.
TL;DRHearing your own voice with environmental effects is planned, but latency and feedback are challenges, so it would add only a reverb tail rather than playing back your voice.
Yeah, that is absolutely planned. It does come with its own challenges compared with just hearing the effects on other players' voices, because other players' voices we receive over the network and we can play the effects on them immediately. In terms of the player's voice, you speak, the game hears it and then the game applies effects, and there's an inherent latency in that and we need to minimize that latency, prevent it from being an immersion-breaking effect, because it needs to be an effect that adds to what you're experiencing, doesn't take anything away from it. So I expect we'll need to create bespoke effects for the players that are slightly different reverbs to what we're hearing on everybody else, but then ultimately feel the same. A lot of the tech is already there, we just need to spend a little time tweaking it and making it do its thing, but yeah, it's going to be in there at some point.
We also have to consider feedback, right? If you're hearing your own voice propagate back through the game and that's getting picked up on your microphone and then just going through again. So there's some practical limitations, maybe resulting in people having to wear headphones more often.
Yeah, well, it's important to know that we won't be playing back your own voice, because we're not trying to create a voice jammer here. We'll just be adding a sort of reverb tail of your voice, in an effect that's appropriate to the area, and it shouldn't be anything that makes you feel like you're drunk.
TL;DRThe audio team credits improved tools and dynamic mixing, which focuses on the closest or most important ships and turns down the rest for a cleaner mix and better frame rate.
Well, we start off with a massively talented audio team, and the guys are really good at what they do, and they'll see issues and jump on hotfixes and stuff, but primarily we're just supporting the upstream features and content that comes down the pipe. And the tech and tools are constantly improving, because we work closely with audio programmers, so they help us get sounds in, streamline the process and stuff, so we can have more time to spend on iteration and stuff like that.
I think in the past few patches we introduced a lot of dynamic mixing things, didn't we? In the past, I think, if there were like 25 ships on screen at once, you'd hear them all and it would just kind of become a bit of a mushy soup of sound. Now we can focus in on the ships that are the closest to you or otherwise the most important and just play those ones and turn the rest of them down and all that kind of stuff. So it'll seem cleaner and more punchy, when really there's just actually less stuff going on. More focused mix, yeah.
Yeah, so a less-is-more approach, which is partly about making the mix cleaner, and it's also partly about optimizing the game, because we want to preserve your frame rate as much as we possibly can.
So there's some work I'm doing to improve the way that audio propagates through different areas, and we have a system in game already which allows us to have different pressures in different areas, so we can have a highly pressurized room and then a lower-pressure atmosphere outside, and then beyond that no pressure as you leave the atmosphere. And I'm currently working on a lot of tech that's going to accumulate those effects and then apply them at the point where the sound's heard. So at some point over the next couple of releases, I would say, we should be seeing some great improvements on how the pressure path from the sound to the player is represented by what you hear.
Well, I mean, it has a bearing on everything, because it's a core feature of the tech, so it's going to be applied to everything as far as the sound designers wish to use it. So yeah, sonic booms are a special case really, because we don't actually represent the speed of sound, in the sense that you don't hear things so much later after the event. We have considered doing that at some point and we maybe will, but then sonic booms are a different thing because we have different atmospheric pressures, so it's not as straightforward as what a sonic boom is on Earth. A sonic boom can happen at completely different speeds depending on the atmosphere that you're in and the planet that you're on.
TL;DRNo tech exists yet for varying non-bespoke voices without sounding unnatural; they'll watch machine learning developments and consider it if it becomes feasible.
No. Well, right now the answer is no. We can apply pitching effects and filtering and things like that, and it always just sounds unnatural. The quality of Star Citizen that we're aiming for is we want it to sound real, so we don't want to make anything that we have sound any worse than it already does. And that's a terrible statement, isn't it? We don't want to degrade the audio at all, is what I should have said. But we are always keeping on top of developments in machine learning and AI, and as soon as we feel like it's a good time for us to start to investigate that, we certainly will, because we know that we've already got the DNA tech that allows us to have a huge variety of different faces, and we need to match that in audio somehow, but the tech just isn't quite there yet. Google are probably the only company in the world that has enough data to actually synthesize any voices in a realistic way. But we will keep an eye on it, and we will consider it if at some point it becomes feasible for us.
Yeah, this ties into the propagation tech that I was talking about before. So in that instance, once this tech is ready, that sound will pick up the effects as it travels. So the sound happening on the top of a canyon will pick up appropriate reflections for that area, and then it will travel down into the bottom of the canyon, and it will have those effects applied as well. So if you're stood next to it, you're going to pretty much hear just the sound of it on the top. But if you have the listener down in the canyon, you're going to hear the accumulated effects of that sound traveling.
TL;DRAfter consulting an air force engineer, they plan to use a small set of consistent warning sounds, backed by the new annunciator panels showing the specific issue visually.
Well, for this one we actually reached out to the community, and we were speaking to an engineer from the Australian Air Force. And yeah, we talked for over an hour about the warning systems, the audio systems you get in aircraft and stuff like that. Historically, we started to try and design a UI sound for every different type of UI notification you can get in a ship. Like a missile's locked onto you, you're locked onto someone else, there's enemies nearby, all that kind of stuff. And it becomes like a language that you have to learn. And if we change that per manufacturer and per ship, then you've always got to relearn this language. In real life, the aircraft have a very limited amount of audio warnings. It's like major, all the way up... major?
And that's where the annunciator panel comes in. It's like, hey, something critical, you look down, and then visually it tells you what the actual specific issue is. So with the introduction of the annunciator panels, it allows us to clear that up and come up with a very clear, intuitive sound design to support that.
Yeah, you could drop your own music in, yeah. We don't offer that at the minute with ship speech. I'm fairly sure you can choose the level of verbosity on the ship speech, so maybe we can offer more options there. But yeah, in terms of custom WAV files, that's not something we're considering right now, but we never rule anything out.
Long and short of it is yes. So we were developing with a big focus on headphones and stereo. There weren't too many considerations for testing and designing stuff for surround discretely, but recently there's a bigger focus on that. We've got ourselves set up with a decent 5.1 room with some really nice speakers. It's something we're aware of, the community's talking about it. So now when we're testing things, we're highly acute of how things translate from stereo and in 5.1. Because audio-engine-wise, it will scale up to whatever playback system you've got, within reason, right? There's only so many configurations of those we can test, but it's absolutely something we're aware of now.
TL;DRVoice chat with people outside the game, such as on Spectrum, is technically possible and would be nice, but it isn't a current focus compared with improving in-game VoIP.
Well, just off the top of my head, our VoIP tech is detached from game servers and detached from the game in such a way that that wouldn't be impossible. It's certainly not our main focus right now, because we want to make sure the VoIP experience in-game is as good as it possibly can be, and that's why a lot of the focus has been on making it diegetic, making all the effects work. But it's certainly something that would be technologically possible, and also I think it would add something to the game if we were to do that, because you could have someone who's sat at home playing in the game and someone else who's got the Spectrum app on their phone, and they could literally sit on the train coming home from work and they could literally call each other. I think that would be amazing.
You could essentially do that with third-party apps like Discord. When it comes to prioritizing, do you prioritize things that are uniquely Star Citizen? I imagine it's a difficult consideration.
We need to be competitive with Discord in order for people to use our VoIP solution, because they've got the option of just switching it off and using Discord. So obviously we have to consider those options if we want to be truly competitive.
There has been some initial investigation into what tech would be required. Because this is Star Citizen, we wouldn't want it to be anything but the best implementation of voice attack that it could be. So there's a heck of a lot of work to get through before we can actually offer that in game. But it is certainly something that's always been on Chris Roberts' wish list, and it remains in our backlog, and at some point we will get around to it.
Yeah, I honestly would say no. I would say if you've got a working audio system and a good set of speakers and headphones... if you're going to spend the money, that's where I'd spend it, in the output medium. Generally, sound cards are sound cards, and if they work, they work, and that's good enough.
It should be a great experience no matter what the playback system is, right? We've got recommended minimum spec, and spend like £10,000 on some studio monitors, then we're sweet, right? These should sound good on whatever Logitech speakers or anything like that. Other speakers are available. Or headphones, so we have to make sure that we cater to that.
Well, we could make it possible if we investigated into it. Rather than tying it to the ship, it would be like a profile attached to the player kind of thing.
We have the assets. I'm sure we could build the technology to be able to swap it out based on request of the player, but it's nothing we've investigated at the moment.
Well, if it looks drastically different, we'll try and support it. And if there's different manufacturers and different lore and all that kind of stuff, then we'll try and support it in line with what the lore says. But recently, we've updated the QT sounds, because we hadn't properly supported shorter QT jumps, because we've got these slingshot jumps and stuff like that. So we've reworked that to make it sound a bit better. But yeah, if it actually is different in the game, then we'll support it and give it a different sound.
What you do is you take something that's inherently silent anyway, and you make it sound cool, and then there's a feature request to put silencers on energy weapons, and we go, okay, why do these need silencers? Because you made them sound loud. You've got ballistic weapons, you've got energy weapons. They need to sound cool and stuff like that. And for gameplay reasons, if you need to silence one, you need to put silencers on the other and stuff like that. I think it would be fun if you had energy weapons that were completely silent. You'd be walking around and then just headshot, down. It's like the old Counter-Strike days where you just don't have a chance. So basically, we need it to sound cool. And then, for gameplay mechanics, we need to put silencers on them and make them sound silent. So, rule of cool.
TL;DRThey're playing with an in-lore sound simulation component that reconstructs sound from light and vibrations, letting them offer cinematic space sound while taking it away, for example during an EMP.
What we want is to create a cool thing, right? And you've got the rule of cool, like Star Wars, cinematic sound in space, but then you've got the full spectrum of also going down to the film Gravity, where it's all contact stuff, so there's no sound propagation in space. So we've got to make a game that's fun, but what we're playing with at the moment is the concept of sound simulation. So there's already current technology. There's a great TED talk where they've got this high-speed, high-frame-rate camera, and they filmed a leaf. There's no microphones on it. And next to the leaf, out of the shot, was a loudspeaker playing Mary Had a Little Lamb. And there's an algorithm that they ran this footage through, and they can recreate the sound from the vibrations that they filmed on the leaf, which is awesome. So we thought that's a great in-lore explanation for why we can hear sound in space. So we're playing with the idea of having this sound simulation unit component in your ship that will analyze light waves and vibrations and then play back what it would sound like in a pressurized environment. So that's how we can justify hearing sounds in space. But it also gives us the ability to say, okay, well, let's have the full spectrum, let's have our cake and eat it too. So let's have the Gravity-esque sound treatment and the full Star Wars stuff. So you're flying around, space battle is all cool, you can hear everything, you know where everything is behind you, all that kind of stuff, and then you get EMP'd. That would be so cool. And then all you hear is your ship, and you see all this stuff going on and you can't hear it, and that's terrifying. It makes you feel really isolated and alone and vulnerable, because all you're hearing is your ship just creaking. There's hush until all your stuff powers up and you get that sense back again. So that's how we kind of justify it.
Again, this comes back to the propagation work that I was talking about earlier. So the plan would be that if there's an open path for a sound to travel through, you will hear it through that path. But if the doors are all closed, you probably will want to hear it sort of muffled, bleeding through the wall. It's tech that I don't have working yet, but it's definitely on the plan. So, yes, there will. There, I've said it.
Yeah, I mean, it can be done. You can ray trace and pick up the materials from the reflections, and you can figure out what effect those materials should have. A bumpy material should make the sound more diffuse, whereas a solid reflective surface would do exactly what you expected; it'd be very reflective in terms of audio as well. But that's the kind of thing... in the audio team, tech like that would always be something that hangs off the visual tech. So really, we've got to have the ray tracing on the visuals before we can think about having it on the audio. That's where we are.
TL;DRJosh Bell and Graham Philipson oppose a full audio mixer because it would give competitive advantages and worse sound, though role-based sound profiles have been toyed with.
I'm against that idea. By all means, let's have this conversation going. If we were to give you an ambient slider, a foley slider, a weapon volume slider and all that stuff, then it would allow people to get a competitive advantage over other people by just turning down the ambience, boosting the foley, boosting the weapons and turning down everything else.
We have toyed with the idea of having sound profiles, like say on a multi-crew ship, based on role and stuff like that. So if you're a pilot, you want to hear a certain mix; if you're an engineer, completely different. Just tailoring the sound experience to whatever the role is if you're in a seat and stuff like that. But giving the backers and players full control over the mix may not be the best way.
TL;DRThe Banu Defender took the longest because there was no reference for alien sound, and constraining themselves to a limited set of source sounds helped.
Well, because we've never made a Banu ship before, and there was nothing to go on, there was no previous work to look at and go, all right, that's the ballpark of what this one should sound like. I had to kind of come up with it from scratch.
We did a design spec briefly, like tribal, tubular, all that kind of stuff, proper alien. Apart from the Vanduul stuff, it's proper alien. It's not normal thrusters, it's not human tech, it's proper alien. You did a great job. There was one moving part, wasn't there, that had a clunk in it, and that sticks out because it's not alien enough.
You're like, oh no. And I was just like, one week of terror of being like, am I a good sound designer? Can I do this? What am I doing? Am I a fraud? And then you finally kind of get there. You're really happy with it.
How do you make something that's never been made before? What do you reference that has no reference? Sometimes the hardest thing is the complete unknown.
Yes. There's a great phrase that I always refer back to. If you get given a completely clean slate, you can do anything you want, it's being paralyzed by the possibility of infinity. So if you sit there, blue-sky thing, you can do anything you want, you go, well, where do I start? Where do I begin? But if you're given some restrictions, you can find creativity in there. When I first joined the company, the audio director at the time was like, right, we've got this mobiGlas system and we need a full UI suite. And with UI stuff, it's like a language, like positive, negative, good, bad, happy, sad kind of stuff, and tracking movement. And I was like, man, I suck at UI. Don't make me do it. It's like, well, that's exactly why you should do it. And I was like, right. So I was playing with loads of synths and making it sound all sci-fi and swishy and stuff. I was like, no, that sucks. And it was called mobiGlas, so I thought I was well clever and got loads of sample libraries of glass breaking, cracking, screeching, all that kind of stuff. And so I'm going to use this as my source, and only that, to generate all my sound effects for the mobiGlas. And I got some really good results for the first pass and stuff. And I took it to the audio director, and it was like, yeah, that's great. You've got all these frequencies in there that you don't need for UI. I'm like, okay then. Back to it again. I spent probably about two weeks solid just doing this UI system. But it turned out all right.
There's a lot of value in doing it. That's what I did for the Banu Defender. When I realized I was struggling, I just kind of sat and found a bunch of sounds that I thought were all in the same ballpark, the same kind of aesthetic, and then put them in a folder and went, right, I've got to do this just with these. The odd exception.
Well, yeah, I guess sometimes we get asked to create effects, and one of them recently was... we're going to be doing a distress call thing, I think, and the idea was to make that distort in a new and interesting way that reflects that it's difficult to reach, and this kind of thing. So that was a fairly open task. But then, having said that, there's only so many ways you can distort a sound. I just made them all available.
Rather than design something for that, we were like, can you write a plugin? You know there's plugins that we all buy and use? Can you just write one for us?
Well, we can push for an analogue where we just get the players going, "It's me, me, me, you can't tell who I am." But that would tie into the voice propagation and stuff like that.
I mean, it's a VoIP feature potentially, and I think it would be a very interesting one to implement. So because I find it interesting as a task, I'll probably do it. But I just have a point on that: the one they do in all the movies where they put a cloth over the telephone, that doesn't work at all.
TL;DRBig ships already have layered ambience that changes with proximity, and as components get sounds and multi-crew roles firm up, each role is meant to hear different mixes.
Yeah, we have the ambience of the ship, so not the movement sounds, not the thruster sounds. They're built up in layers of bed ambience for the room and then distant details and then really close-up details. But when we have sound on each component and stuff, there'll be a rough vibe of that component being in the room, and then as you get closer to the actual thing, you'll hear all of the details of it. That also ties into the plans to have different mixes per room for each kind of role in a multi-crew ship. So yeah, there'll be different sounds if you're in the engineering room; there'll be a certain set of things that you need to know about as the engineer that the pilot doesn't need to know about, that the turret gunner doesn't need to know about, all this kind of stuff.
We're also tying it together with, say, the load and offload of the thrusters and engine power plants and stuff, how if you go full throttle, all the ambiences and tones can change slightly based on the load on the ship and stuff like that. So you can be on the bridge giving it full throttle, and then the guy in engineering would hear all this stuff changing in relation to the throttle amount and stuff.
TL;DRMany warning sounds are legacy and too numerous, so the team wants to simplify them with the annunciator panel and keeps tuning diegetic cues, while joking the player should pilot better.
Maybe just pilot better, bro. Now, again, looking at the introduction of the annunciator panel and stuff, we're looking to really clean that up, because a lot of those UI notifications are really legacy. When we moved from FMOD to Wwise, a lot of them were in place there, and I designed some of them. There's one that sounds like a squealing pig. It's like, I hate it, but it's still in there. But yeah, so a lot of those UI sounds are legacy, and we will get around to them, but the trouble is we're constantly adding features and abilities to ships and stuff like that, so we need a finite set of everything we need to support, and if we strip it back down to the major, moderate and minor warning stuff, then it'll be a lot cleaner.
I think one of the problems at the moment is there's too many different sounds. You can't learn the language of it, because there's a completely different sound for every different thing that goes wrong. Simplifying that down to...
Yeah, that's a really good point, because we've got dialogue assets to convey messages about the ship and what the situation is. We've also got the UI notifications of what the HUD's telling you is happening, and then we've also got the sound effects of what's happening and stuff like that. And sometimes they're all stepping over each other, and some dialogue assets are too long for the action, like proximity warnings. It's like, "Danger, you're about to crash into something on the left," and then you've already done it, kind of thing. So just deciding what needs voice, what needs sound effects and what needs UI.
Also, the diegetic warnings that you're getting shot at and stuff are something that we're constantly changing the mix of and trying to get right, like for the sound of bullets whizzing by the ship and the sound of impacts and stuff: how loud should they be? How loud should friendly ships near you be versus enemy ones? Should the one that you're targeting be louder, or the one that's targeting you be louder? We're constantly trying to find the sweet spot with that.
We are pushing to improve that whole experience as a pilot in a ship in Star Citizen. A lot of the time we find ourselves supporting every single feature and then moving on to the next feature. And now there's a bit of a push to look at that experience as a whole and improve it and make it a much better gameplay experience.
TL;DRPiloting breathing sounds are driven mainly by G-force and were toned down after the new flight model made the character breathe too hard, and they proved a useful feedback mechanism.
Well, I have asthma, so that makes sense. Yes, so when you hear breathing, you're actually hearing me. All those breathing assets were recorded by myself. The amount of times I threw up or passed out recording that. So fundamentally, right now we've got two breathing suites. We've got normal default, which is FPS, EVA and stuff. But then we've also got piloting. And the piloting set has its own set of logic, and the main thing that really drives it up and down, with faster and slower breathing, is G-force and stuff like that. So if they change the flight model or make some ships faster than others, basically I've got one breathing suite that needs to respond. So how many Gs can you pull and stuff? So I think I had to nerf it a bit. It was just ramping up way too quick.
Yeah, it's like, slow, nice turn, and it's like, you pass out. It was awful. But it's constantly being tuned and dialed in and stuff, and then we just brought it down in volume. I thought it was really cool, and if you're EVAing and stuff, bring the breathing up a little bit, just to give you that kind of isolationist feel, like you're really vulnerable and stuff. But we didn't know if it was going to work out very well, because you're the player. I am playing the game, and you don't want the sound of someone breathing for you. It's like with the VoIP stuff: you want to talk in the game, and if you have emotes where a dialogue line is playing for your character, you can have some disconnect there. So we didn't know if it was going to work or not, but it actually turned out to be a pretty useful feedback mechanism.
TL;DRDebris impacts on the canopy already exist after ship explosions; extending them to asteroid fields would be cool, but sounds can't be put on every intersecting particle.
We actually already have that, but that might be a sign it's too quiet. Yeah, we have that now for when the ship's been blown up. We have a zone that extends from the point of the explosion, and if you find yourself and your ship in that zone, then you get debris impacts depending on how long it was since... how dense the debris would be at that point, basically. It would be cool to extend that to random ones in the middle of an asteroid field and all that kind of stuff, where a ship hasn't blown up yet. That would be cool to have.
Well, there's two kinds of considerations. Either we can tie into what's actually happening in the game: are there any particles, like VFX, that are impacting with the ship? Or do we just imply that... explosion goes off, we're in an asteroid field, those conditions are true, play debris kind of sounds. Yeah, I think we can't put a sound on every particle that's intersecting with the ship and stuff, that would just be nuts.
TL;DRMusic and sound design mostly interact in the mix, where frequencies in one can be dynamically carved out for the other, and overly tonal ambience must avoid clashing with the music's key.
You've got two different types of music. You've got diegetic and non-diegetic. So diegetic is music that is in the location, like a radio or PA system and stuff like that. So that will be affected by propagation, all that kind of stuff. You shoot a speaker, it'll be destroyed and stuff. But then you've got the score, which is kind of god music, non-diegetic. Now, one wouldn't really cause another one to trigger necessarily, but music dynamically switches based on the intensity, all that kind of stuff. The main way they interact is probably more with the mix. So what you can do is dynamically meter the frequency spectrum of the sound effects. And if you deem the sound effects to be more important, you can bring down those frequencies in the music. So you're kind of carving out frequencies in the music to allow the sound design to poke through. Or conversely, you can have it the other way around. So if you have certain frequencies in the music you want to emphasize, you can bring down the sound effects to accommodate that.
We also have to be careful about overly tonal sound design as well sometimes. If there's the cinematic music for coming down to a certain planet, and you happen to do the background planetary ambience for that planet with a slight tonal element that is half a step below the key of the music...
No, we should. And in elevators as well. I watched a video, and it was on intuitive design. It was about accessibility for people who are visually impaired, and how audio can assist people in the real world. And it was talking about elevators. So you know the bongs you get? If it's one bong, the elevator is going up, or two bongs...
So you can get in an elevator, not be able to see, and you'll know which way the elevator is traveling. That was awesome. So bringing those kinds of elements into the game would be great.
Oh, you can put elevator music in. It's not the highest priority. We've got all the cool music we need to write for all these new locations coming online.
TL;DRThey get a creepy feel by walking the ship repeatedly and iterating, placing ambient audio triggers in corners and centres, pitching sounds differently in darker spots, and implying unseen things behind walls.
Yeah, we just spend a lot of time in the level, getting a feel for it, and thinking about what the player should feel when they're in those kinds of environments. I guess it's just a lot of... I don't want to say trial and error, but it kind of is. You try something out and then go through the whole process of walking around the ship and going from one place to another and seeing if that feels right.
There's a basic concept for, say, a space, a room, a corridor, Josh. You would dress each corner with an audio trigger spot and then have one in the centre, or an audio area ambience. So it's got a bed ambience and then each corner with sound slightly different. And based on the aesthetic, the way it looks... say you even support the same sound in each corner, right? But this side's darker. You can pitch it down a little bit and just guide the player's subconscious on this kind of journey going, hey, there's something cool over here. We'll have something trigger every 10 seconds or something. What's really cool about ambience is you can imply stuff that's behind the walls that you can't see. So if you're walking down this corridor... corridors, Josh... and there's pipes and stuff like that, you can just allude to stuff being on the other side. If it's habitation, someone having an argument in the hab next door to you and stuff like that.
Well, that's a question we can overcome later, isn't it? Let's concentrate on fun. We should have ship horns as well. Somebody was asking for horns. It may have been in the question thread.
I saw a video recently of somebody approaching a few guys who were on a planet, and they were flying down towards them and trying to speak to them, but they didn't have a mechanism for that, and I think the ship loudspeaker thing is a really good idea.
Well, we all have bug lists that we're working our way through. And if you find bugs while you're playing, please report them. Certainly in my case, there's a rather large list of issues that I'm working through, and to list them would certainly use up a lot more than the time we have left. But I've talked a little bit about the propagation system that I'm working on, and I think that is a big issue that the game suffers from right now, that audio doesn't propagate properly. So that's a big focus for me.
TL;DRDamaged ships already get rattlier with changing thruster sounds, but audio only knows health level, not what is missing; whistling for lost wings or breaches is something they want to do if it can be tied in.
They already do; they get more rattly and more vibration-y, and the health level changes the sound of the thrusters and stuff. Implying some sort of hull breach or that kind of thing would be really cool. You hear it whistling behind a panel where there used to be a wing, but now it's just open to the air or something.
Because the damage system is quite dynamic. Different bits can come off. It's not like you get 25% damage and you lose a wing. You can cut off different bits of the ship.
But if there are hero items like wings, or something that changes the fundamental aerodynamics of the ship, if we could tie into whatever values, "the wing is now gone equals true" kind of thing, then we could start introducing audio specifically, and it'd be that feedback, the degradation stuff, like, hey, your ship sounds like it's battered; oh, that's the sound of my wing that's gone. So you kind of learn the whistles or the rattles and stuff like that.
Say you're at 95% damage and you're trying to come in and you get air turbulence, whether the turbulence itself would start damaging your ship, it might rip your wings off and stuff, that would be cool. You cannot enter atmosphere.