Graham Philipson · Lead Audio Programmer

Yes, I'll take that since it's my baby, I guess. So we've been progressing steadily. What we showed back at CitizenCon was a tech demo. And as you know, tech demos are not always fully rounded, finished features. So what we were showing was some of the design decisions we've made about how Claudius was going to work, and we demonstrated a little bit of that. But one of the big decisions that we made behind Claudius was that every single audio feature becomes systemic. And that's a huge undertaking. It means that we've got to go through every single game system that exists, right down from the tiny little things like the jukebox all the way up to capital ships and everything in between, every single feature. And we have to implement those features in the tool, in Claudius, and in the underlying CIG audio engine. That allows us to make all of those features available to designers where they choose to put them. So it's a really big undertaking. We're making really good progress on it, and we're hopeful that it's only going to be a few more months before we can actually release something with Claudius active inside the build. That won't be where Claudius is actually driving the whole audio of the game, because that's sort of the longer-term goal, to replace every system. But things are progressing really well. We've got some really great features coming in. I do hope that we can talk about it again in another video, maybe in a few months' time or something. I'm not sure when it will be. But we've got a lot of really good plans for it, and we want it to be a real sort of revelation for designers when it comes out. So we're not releasing it until it's ready to be used. So that's the big thing. It's not under wraps as such, but it's still germinating.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And backers and watchers of the show are used to hearing the word release apply to the moment when they get their hands on it. You're, of course, talking about a release internally, to when folks like Jack over here get to use it. And like many of our procedural or systemic tools, it's not designed to take the work away from the designers and do the work for them, but just provide them more tools and more capabilities in order to be more efficient and more successful in the creation of their content.

Bob Rissolo · Dialogue Lead

I was just going to say, really quickly, to chime in: it's really about letting the creatives be creative. What happens when you don't have a great tool set, or a tool set that's quite aged? There's a lot of extra work that has to go into getting what you want out of it. And it's a lot of time sink. It's just a lot of faff. And so the sound designers have to spend a lot of time in that world when it would be much better for them to be doing more creative work. And so that's really the whole meaning behind this, just to get the creatives to do more creative work. And that's the big key.

Graham Philipson · Lead Audio Programmer

Yeah, the way I put it is the whole design is workflow first. So we look at a good workflow and then we build all the infrastructure behind it that allows it to happen.