Once weather effects are implemented in the game, what are your thoughts about being able to hear raindrops hitting the cockpit glass of my ship?
TL;DRThey wouldn't put sound on individual raindrops but will drive rain audio from data such as intensity and surface, likely using good recordings, and say rain on cockpit glass and outposts is definitely something they'll do.
We have to look at these things and try and do them as efficiently as possible. Now, I don't think we'd ever put sound on physicalized raindrops, but we can take a data set and say: is it raining? Yes. Is it light, medium or heavy? What surface is it interacting with? Glass, metal? There's lots of metal in our game.
That sort of approach of trying to play a single drop sound for every raindrop that hits the window probably isn't even the best way of doing it, to be honest, because there's a certain nostalgic, emotional tone to those, like sitting in the car when it's raining and you hear the rain hitting the windscreen. If you're just using individual sounds of single raindrops, you couldn't capture that feeling of being sheltered from the storm or whatever, which just one really, really good recording that you play with some logic behind it could do.
But it is definitely something we're going to do. It's a great scenario: imagine you're in an outpost and it's all powered up, it's all good, there's a storm coming, you've just made it in time, and then your power module fails, and you just hear all the debris batter up against the side of it and rain on the top. That'd be ace.