Is Star Audio a replacement of the entire audio engine or simply an extension of the system we have now?
TL;DRStar Audio is designed as a full replacement, with smarter sound budgeting, and the old system is planned to go eventually once every game system is hooked into it.
So it's absolutely been designed as a replacement. Some of those issues that you hear are due to some fairly naive culling of sounds, which obviously in Star Citizen you can't predict what's going to happen. We have a very limited budget for how many sounds we can play, how many ships we can play sounds for, things like that. And Star Audio is absolutely planned to replace all this stuff and improve all these situations. So in the example of weapon fire cutting out, we have a much more intelligent budgeting system that will take into account the importance of those sounds to the player at that moment, whether they're visible on screen, how close they are, how many other sounds in the similar categories are playing. So we can definitely improve all those things with Star Audio. It's just a case of working through all our systems because we have audio systems hooked into pretty much everything the game can do. So we need to work through all those things one by one and get them all hooked into Star Audio. And eventually, sometime down the line, we won't have any of the old system.