Reverb: will it ever be a thing in Star Citizen [e.g. in the cave systems currently being explored]?
TL;DRThey can already detect the size of the space a player is in via raycasts to adjust reverb, caves will be a new venture, and sound still isn't delayed by travel time for gameplay reasons.
Yeah, we could talk about it in different contexts, really.
So looking at the cave example you've given there, we can currently calculate the size of space that you're in by having raycasts emit from the player, and they'll intersect with geometry, and the read from that will say: are you inside? Are you not inside? What size of space are you inside? Are you half inside a space? And based on the data that comes back from that, we can change the reverbs that are applied to certain sounds. And we've not had caves before, so that's going to be a new venture. And that'll be fun to play with, because at the moment we don't honor the propagation of sound through a medium with regards to the speed of sound. So if a sound happens at distance, you hear it at the point it emits, for gameplay purposes. But if you're in a cave and we have dynamic reverb and delay, that there implies sound traveling over time.