We've got something called SoundSim now. I was reading that you guys have made some advancements in that recently. What can you tell us?

Yeah, Jason Cobb has been doing a lot of stuff. He's based in Austin. The general concept behind that is, you could argue, a device that we use to give an excuse or reason for sound to be, and to communicate what it does within the context of Star Citizen. But it's partly introducing rules that are consistent for it. Because the general concept of it is, and there's technology that exists now for doing this actually, where you analyze your environs with either lasers or something crazy like that. They're actual lasers. But lasers in real life are a lot less intrusive than you think. You can actually derive sound information. Sound is meant to be an informational stream, to inform decisions that the player makes from moment to moment. So that's really what that mechanism is all about. And you can't really think of all the contexts in which you want to resort to it, or what should be SoundSim or what shouldn't. Is it on at this point? How much does it come from the ship? How much of it is an onboard device that each player has? So a lot of it is just working out conceptually as much as the actual system itself. There's a lot of dependencies and stuff with it. So I spend a lot of time thinking about this thing.

I mean, it's weird if you don't have it. What I like about it is that it will be something I hope will be within the control of the player. We'll be able to turn this off, and, I can't commit to this fully, but that's pretty much advice I would say about everything: I cannot confirm or deny. But I hope eventually it will be harnessed as a gameplay mechanism in its own right. Maybe it can be turned on and off for some sort of tactical or strategic advantage. We need to present these kind of elements and tools sometimes, almost for designers to say, "Oh, okay, that's something that we could actually use to fold into a mission or scenario," or something like that. And I think that would really open possibilities up.

I think it'd be really cool in a situation where you're in a big space battle and you get EMP'd or your ship gets disabled and then your SoundSim falls away. And then it's just you stuck with the sound of your immediate surroundings of the ship. You see all the stuff going on and you've lost that sensory input. And then you're really in trouble.

There was a bit we were thinking about, maybe making it so it's processed to such a high fidelity by your ship. And so that would give you almost a tactical reason to park up your ship near to certain action and stuff like that. But again, that's something I've talked about with designers, whether that's something they would actually go for. Maybe that's something that would be painting them into too much of a corner. I like thinking in terms of the sound having meaning like that and being able to actually present possible gameplay things to everybody, really.