Is a more rigorous simulation of sound on the table? Doppler effect, sonic booms, sound actually traveling across distances and being delayed, no sound in space?

Sonic boom. It does come up every show, and it's tricky. We understand why people want it. So we've made an active decision to not go along with the speed of sound in the game. That's primarily because as soon as something happens in the game, you want the audio feedback there for gameplay reasons. So as soon as something happens, you want to hear it. And what a sonic boom is: if you've got, say, an observer and an aircraft moving at or faster than the speed of sound, the sound builds up at the front of the aircraft. So it's basically a wall of sound that persists. And as the aircraft passes by you, the observer, you perceive that as a transient boom, but it's just a wall of sound passing your singular location. So what we do with ships specifically is we have NPC proxy passby loops, which, in atmosphere specifically, is the kind of rippage you normally associate with jet engines and whatnot. And then we have bespoke flyby sounds that are triggered when certain conditions are met: the ship is moving at a certain speed, which will vary which flyby sound it plays, and then how close it is to the player. Now, to scratch that itch for sonic booms, we currently have quite heavily designed flyby sound effects that are quite sci-fi. For atmospheric flight, what we could do is look to introduce more typical sonic boom elements in these passbys. So there'd be a bigger delineation between a passby in space versus a passby in an atmosphere, just to give that feel of a boom. But we don't typically honor the speed of sound, because that would be massively expensive to calculate, for one. But that's not saying it's completely off the table, because we might play with it creatively, if there are certain contexts where you want that delay between visuals and sonics just for impact, say if it's in a cutscene or something. So we are aware of the mechanic. It's just something we try and move away from gameplay-wise. But I don't know, Graham, just blue-skying, how expensive do you think it would be to create a system that would accurately map the speed of sound over distance in varied pressurized environments? Because the medium would determine the speed of sound. Sound moves faster in water, the denser the medium, than it does in air. And then you have to account for the different atmospheric pressures of the different planets and how thick the atmosphere is at different altitudes. And then send it out to 100 different clients at various points on the planet.

Yeah, I mean, it would be quite a large undertaking. There would be two possible approaches. One would be to delay the audio itself, so adding a delay step to the playback of the audio, which would be a little bit expensive in terms of CPU, maybe not so much, but it would use a heck of a lot of memory, because you'd have to be storing up all your audio and waiting to play it when the time comes that you should play it. And that would be applied across all sounds, so that would be prohibitive. The other approach would be effectively to delay all the events that affect the audio. So if a weapon fires, you'd store up the fact that it had fired, and then at the point where the delay time is up, you would then fire it. But again, you've got the same problem of having to queue up all these actions that happened and then play them back after a time. And it would just be a hugely complex undertaking. But I think really that's not why we don't do it, because we would be able to do it. We would find a solution. That's what we do. I think the big problem goes back to what Phil mentioned earlier in this call, which is that for gameplay reasons, it doesn't make sense. If somebody's firing at you, you want to know. If audio is the thing that tells you that somebody's firing a weapon at you, you want to know straight away. You want to know you've got time to spin around and see who it is. And if you have real speed of sound delay, you can be dead before you hear the shot. And that doesn't make for a fun game. It might for some people. Some people might be big fans of sniper games and things like this. But our game does a lot of things, and to focus on that style of gameplay, I think, would probably be wrong.