How come several soundscapes are gone? The Area18 tram, for example, used to beep and buzz.
TL;DRThe missing soundscape sounds like a bug that they'll look into, and they say such breakages are easy to miss, so they're working toward automated audio testing that isn't ready yet.
Sounds like a bug, so something we'll look into. Thanks for letting us know.
It's key to note that certain overarching implementations of systems and things like that do change over time. Quite often what happens is something else might happen inexplicably and go unnoticed because it was working before. And it's always hard to catch those things in game development. It really is. That's honestly why we have QA and the community sharing these types of things, because it really helps us catch those kinds of things: we've done it, it worked, and how do we know when it breaks?
It's also why we've got quite a big push going on internally for automatic testing. So one of the things we're aiming for is knowing what the response to a particular gameplay situation should be from the audio system and confirming that it is still the case from build to build. But we're not ready with that yet. So one day we'll have a system that can pick these things up before they go out.