Are there plans to add variety to the rain sound effects (roof sound, no surface, etc.), or are there maybe some engine limitations currently?asked by St. Paulus
TL;DRRain was scoped for one event but spread across the whole universe, so the team calls it an early version and will keep improving it for different surfaces, with a fuller dynamic weather system planned.
Yes. So this is a classic us thing. So we scoped the rain initially for Stormbreaker to support that event. And the way that we looked to implement it, it actually unintentionally scaled across the entire verse. Now, a rain system is huge. You need to make sure you've got all the different types of rain, you've got all the different types of surfaces, material types, material construction; like a metal barrel will sound very different to a metal canopy versus it being inside of a car. So we consider our rain system like version 0.5 and we will continue to work on it.
It's really complicated. Precipitation, like you're saying, we've got so many surfaces to consider, and also the speed of the rain, which angle it's going at, how intense it is and what it hits and how it hits stuff. And sometimes rain can sound like white noise and it's really a challenge trying to make precipitation sound good. And that's what we want to do. It's got to hit different surfaces. It's not as easy as you would think, and it gets in the way of things sometimes. The way we mix the rain and the way we're going to have to dip it down so we don't affect the music and the narrative challenges and anything else. It's very tricky to do that. We had to get the stuff out for Stormbreaker, because it was in the storm obviously, but it's going to be across the verse and it's going to hit lots of different areas in different ways.
I often say we have the same conversations the backers do, just several weeks earlier. When the first reviews for Stormbreaker came in, we were saying the same thing. It's like, we should be hearing it here. It should sound different when it hits this versus when it hits this. It's just time.
Yeah, it is time.
There's a full dynamic weather system planned and we'll be fully supporting that. This is going to be more limited, but it's limited but far-reaching. And now we need to backfill and sort it out.