How much audio is there in a game of this magnitude?
TL;DRThere are tens of thousands of pre-mixed WAV files of dialogue, effects and music, which the software plays by rules that set speaker position, volume and pitch from the 3D environment.
Well, there are tens of thousands of individual WAV files all getting played either one after the other or all at the same time, depending on the computer software. And they are dialogue files, sound effects, musical clips. We have all three of those kinds of sounds baked into WAV files. We call that a pre-mix or a pre-rendered type of WAV file. And we decide how to play those, which loudspeaker they're going to come out from as they move around the surround field, and the volume, so that things get louder as they approach or quieter as they go away. We change the pitch, so things will do that Doppler-style thing. As you fly, you're initially approaching something and then you start departing from it; that changes the pitch, just like in real life. So the computer's running all these software systems, analyzing the 3D environment constantly, and picking which of the WAV files to play, and we have to set all that up. It's almost like a wind-up toy. You wind it up, and then you just let go of it.
You give it the rule set.
Yeah, exactly.