Bob Rissolo · Lead Dialogue

This one, actually, I really like this question because my gamer geek is coming out and going, yes! Because I've actually been wanting this for a while. Ever since we really kind of got the FOIP going, and even a little bit before that, when we were trying to really have the ability for a player to be, for example, if an NPC is talking on a comms and you're sitting in the room with them, you're going to hear the dry signal of him talking into the comms. But then if, let's say, the comms is to the hangar down below, you also hear it coming out of the PA and into the speaker array below. So if the NPC can do it, surely the player can do it too. We would like to get to that point. There will be a point. I think that maybe the bottleneck that's kind of stopping us there is we need to talk with UI and get at least a way for a player to actually interact with the PA, obviously. And then we also need to work out, because every ship will need to have that PA structure, speakers or the entities and all that stuff to kind of outline what the ship is. Especially with our bigger capital ships. I mean, they're like little floating cities, right? We want to be able to isolate different rooms. If you are really a captain and you want to be able to talk to your engineering, click on the engineering button, go talk to, Scotty, I need more power.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It's also hard because through the voice channels, there's already a ship-wide voice channel, but it's not a PA system in the ship. It is a voice channel through comms and everything. I think what this question is really touching on is that sense that it comes through positional audio in the ship. If you're closer to the speaker, you'd hear it louder. If you're farther from the speaker, you're gone. For me, my favorite ship's the Genesis Starliner, and I absolutely need to be able to do a 'this is your captain speaking' from the front, or I don't even know why I would fly it. So I'm with you on this one, Bob. And it's different than the current in-game comms that are there. But at the same time, because that serves somewhat of that purpose already, this might not be the highest priority.

Bob Rissolo · Lead Dialogue

It's using the same tech, too. I mean, that's the big part of it. It's using that same tech where a character is speaking into a mic that's being transmitted, and then comes out of a speaker, whether the speaker is your headset, your comm, or the speaker is a PA in a room. It's utilizing the same technology there. So we had to first work on that and get that hammered out. And then now we can work on how do we get it into the hands of the players, through FOIP and things like that.