What's been the hardest sound so far for you to make or replicate?
TL;DREach speaker names a different hardest sound: mobiGlas UI sounds, the weight of ships in the new flight model, and convincing distant weapon fire, which depends on environment, distance and medium.
I think we've each got one of those. I think the hardest sound I ever designed for the project was when I very first started, all those years ago. I went to the audio director and I was like, "I really suck at UI sounds." He's like, "Great, design all the new mobiGlas stuff." I was like, all right. So I spent an entire week just generating source. A typical process when you're sound designing is you get all your audio plugins and you get all your source material in. For this, I actually thought I'd be clever and use glass samples, for mobiGlas, because I'm clever like that. And you just throw loads of content through these plugin chains and you change them as you go along: this works well, this doesn't work well, generate loads of assets. And then from that, with UI, you have to try and make a language. This is a positive action. This is a negative action. This is for movement. This is for a static button press. So I think all in all, it took me about three weeks to get a first iteration. And that's with me thinking the audio director was going to be criticizing my every move, because I thought I sucked at it. It went all right and then improved, gradually moved on and on.
How about you, Josh?
It's not really any specific sound. The most challenging thing for me has been, in the new flight model, trying to capture the feeling of weight in the ships. When you accelerate at max thrust and then afterburn, you need to really feel like that's a big event and you've got all this power behind you. There's no one sound, it's just sculpting that whole experience. There's been a lot of trial and error. Just balancing all the different moving parts.
Are you happy with where it's at now, or are you still working on it?
It's getting there. I'm excited for people to hear it.
It should be a huge improvement over IFCS 1. And Barney?
I think the thing that I have spent a long time on, and it's been a lot of trial and error and we really haven't got right yet, is the sound of distant weapon fire, when people are on planets and things like that and they're firing their guns at you from hundreds of meters away. It's a really difficult sound to get right. I thought it'd be as easy as recording a distant gun and then using that, but it really isn't. There's a lot more consideration to the sound than just using what you would think is the right sound. Making it sound organic and making it sound real is quite difficult.
Because the complexity of that is: what environment is the sound originating in? What is the distance between you and it, and the medium? And then what environment are you in, listening to that sound? So if someone's got a sniper rifle in a desert, and then you're in a canyon. And it's the initial sound of the fire versus the whizz-by of any ammunition flying by you. So there's a lot to consider there.