What are the plans for sound simulation in different environments? When we have echo and reverb, does the sound still emanate from the sound source, or does it come from the wall that it's bouncing from?

So this is slightly a crossover. We were talking about this before, actually: a technical question with how environmental sound, or acoustic effects, I think we refer to them as, work in Wwise and stuff at the moment. We're trying to come up with a way to make that automatic by having raycasts and stuff out from the player. So a system level, that word again, where the game knows what kind of room you're in and then adjusts automatically. I've done a lot of markup-type stuff before, where you manually go in and set out a room to sound of a certain size and dimensions and that sort of thing. I want us to be able to do that for certain bespoke locations, because I think humans can do a better job of that ultimately than maybe a system can, but that should be interleaved with a system that chooses the right preset or whatever for doing that, and perhaps layers them as well. And there's so much more work to be done in that area. It tends to be a bit more 2D at the moment. And I think the propagation system, which I think I mentioned already, once it takes all those acoustic effects and ports them properly through doors and stuff, it would actually bring a new level to the perceived realism of the game. It's quite a big subject, actually. I think we spend quite a bit of time thinking about that.

The trouble we face is we want to model how audio works as true to real life as possible. However, if you do a one-to-one model, then it might sap all the fun out of the game. So we have to balance that. So if you're getting shot at, the whole crack-thump thing: you hear the bullet whiz by you, and then you hear the thump way off in the distance. If we model that one-to-one, the distances we deal with in the game are huge. So if you've got a futuristic sniper rifle that can fire over, say, a 10-mile headshot, then you'd never perceivably hear the gunfire. You'd just hear the bullet go by. Some people might like that and stuff, but we have to make sure we balance the fun of the gameplay as well.

It's usually where Phil will say stuff like "rule of cool". I don't think there is a rule of cool. I think there's maybe a set of rules that may end up cool if you're lucky.