Regarding planetary sounds, how difficult will it be to have procedural sounds which key into the different biomes? Does a weather effect sound different if it's going over a snow biome versus a desert biome versus a jungle biome?
TL;DRBiome-dependent weather sounds are intended through blended positional sounds that change with weather and time of day, though not all the technology is ready yet.
Yeah, of course it will. We don't have all the tech ready for that right now. But the idea is to have, again, all the different positional sounds in the level. Each different audio trigger spot, each different sound, we can have a blend between different sounds, and they can change according to the weather, according to the wind, according to whether it's daytime or nighttime. We're trying to make things as dynamic as possible, because usually you would have a bespoke event in a game and you would know exactly what's going to happen and when it's going to happen. In these cases it's a bit different. It's more like combining different ideas for different solutions. There's never one solution that addresses them all.
You mentioned that a sound might sound different between day and night?
Yes, that's correct. So one of the things would be the ambiences, for example. If you're in the desert, you would have a specific ambience. If the temperature is quite high, you would have a different ambience. If the temperature drops down and it's nighttime, you would have a different ambient sound.