What is the difference between Star Audio and the realistic audio mode?asked by McSpaz

It might be easier to list the overlaps, because they're very different things. So Star Audio is effectively a kind of middleware replacement. It's not going to replace Wwise, which we will always use, at least for the time being, to play back our sounds, but it's a replacement for the glue between game systems and the audio system that then allows a lot more freedom to sound designers to do whatever they want. So where existing ways of hooking sounds up to things are quite prescriptive, you might look at an animation and say, I want this animation to play this exact sound from the library. What Star Audio does is it allows you to basically just flag the fact that the animation is played and leave the decision on what the sound does down to the sound designer, and they can then make that contextual if they want. They can add logic, they can do all kinds of different things. We can also do things like passing events down hierarchies at runtime. So I always use this example, but if somebody's holding a weapon on the hip and they're piloting a ship and the ship gets hit by a missile, we can make the gun on the hip rattle because the ship got hit, because there's a hierarchy that's being tracked at runtime, which we never had before with the old systems. So there's a lot more contextual information available to all the sounds. And the realistic mode is kind of a subset of that, a microcosm of that whole ecosystem, which is basically listening to whether there's any audio pressure between the listening device of the ears and the sound emission device, which may be a ship or a weapon or whatever. So the realistic mode is a sort of first use of what Star Audio does, or it's a high use of what Star Audio does. But it's got much more aesthetic presence, I think, to the player, which is why I think it's something that people are very interested in. But Star Audio is the tech behind that thing.