Some movies like Interstellar and Cloverfield, or games like Alien: Isolation, have an ingenious low bass down to 20 hertz. Would it be possible to bring this into Star Citizen? It increases the depth by a lot when good subwoofers are in demand, but unfortunately they have little to do in most games.
TL;DRDeep 20 Hz bass is likely to come later, because stacking low-end content muddies the mix and they first need mix technology to control where bass comes from, such as resynthesizing it or sending discrete content to the sub.
Right. There's actually a good reason, I think, that a lot of games eschew that, because it's a lack of predictability of how all the sounds come together. It's really easy, I think, to get a lot of sounds... again, this relates back to the limit of sounds we have, what we mentioned before. If you actually have quite a few sounds playing at once that all have this low-end content, it creates a mush. It becomes very ill-defined, and you'll find that actually a lot of the... I think that's something that's going to come later, when we really turn on the bass, if you like, once we figure out where low end should come from and how to limit that in a more intelligent way. Because I agree, people associate that with it being impressive and powerful sounding. I just really don't want to essentially muddy everything at this point, particularly. It's partly mix tech that we have to bring online for that. We've looked into almost resynthesizing bass, like taking it out of sounds and then selectively putting it back in, which I don't think anyone else has been doing before. So there's plenty of stuff we can do in that area. And I'm keen to get it in, but it's just one of those things where it's more likely to be a bit further along than at the moment.
And also authoring discrete sub content, right? We've looked into that as well. So rather than just routing everything 5.1, 7.1, 9.2 or whatever, we can actually discretely send chosen information to the sub to make sure we don't muddy the mix, rather than have everything sent.
Again, that's another thing. If you put lots of low-end information in sounds that have been sent to stuff like environmental reverb and things, you get that in the reverb as well. There's not much room. It's a jostling room down at that end of the audio spectrum. It just takes extra management.
If we're doing anything clever with metering in Wwise, then you've got these sub-bass frequencies going on that give you a lot of amplitude information that might not even be perceivable.
Yeah, a lot of people don't have that stuff. A lot of our users are headphone-based, and actually we tend to get quite a bit of low end of a type through headphones, but you don't get that physical sensation as much, that kind of hitting you like a wave that you get from speakers.