Local ambient sounds at locations are awesome, but I feel like the game lacks large-scale ambient soundscapes. It would be awesome to be on the outskirts of a city and hear the hustle and bustle in the distance with traffic, sirens, speaker announcements, etc., or to pick up background radio chatter when approaching a spaceport or space station.asked by Vec

But it would be awesome, we do agree. Gosh, that's more complicated than these questions would suggest. Because when you come away from a large area of noise like a cityscape, what do we want to hear if we're traveling around it? Do we want to hear the sirens? There's so much different propagation, echo and reverb going on there, without it sounding like mush or just noise. It's an interesting consideration. And of course we would consider it, because when you pull away from a cityscape, you need a sound. But actually how we focus on that is complicated, because we would deal with it in a linear way differently than we would in an immersive way in a game. So I haven't really thought about this yet.

It's almost where you tackle it like LODs. So when you're at zero point, when you're in the point of interest like Area18 or Lorville, a lot of the stuff you'll hear is bespoke and discrete. It's coming from 3D emitters or volumes we put down there, or it's attached to a ship that's flying by. So everything's kind of the space of what you can see, hear and feel. And then when you're at mid distance, we can take that and put in designed content that is like a consolidation of that, and then scale it to what it would sound like at distance. Graham's worked on grouping systems and stuff where, if you've got three sound sources, it will know they are the same brush or the same sound source, group them together and then switch to a group sound of that rather than three discrete sources. So we can leverage technology like that.

Yeah, so one of the features in Star Audio is this ability to basically convert a sound that's too far away from you to be heard into a statistic that feeds into another sound. So if you think of the city, then you might have lots of vehicles moving around in there, like you say, sirens going off, these kinds of things. And we can use those statistics without playing all those sounds and creating cacophony. We can use them to decide what sound we should play in their place.

Yeah, because we have to make choices. It's not just a case of, when you pull away from an environment, we're going to just roll off the top end and give you reverb and make it mushy-sounding. We've got to actually pinpoint which are the POIs which you'd want to be sustained aurally out of that environment. And then we'd have to respond to stuff that's giving lights or movement. It's difficult. It's an interesting question, because the challenge is quite difficult.

Tie into time of day and all that kind of stuff.