Phil Peers-Smallwood · Lead Sound Designer

Maybe just pilot better, bro. Now, again, looking at the introduction of the annunciator panel and stuff, we're looking to really clean that up, because a lot of those UI notifications are really legacy. When we moved from FMOD to Wwise, a lot of them were in place there, and I designed some of them. There's one that sounds like a squealing pig. It's like, I hate it, but it's still in there. But yeah, so a lot of those UI sounds are legacy, and we will get around to them, but the trouble is we're constantly adding features and abilities to ships and stuff like that, so we need a finite set of everything we need to support, and if we strip it back down to the major, moderate and minor warning stuff, then it'll be a lot cleaner.

Josh Bell · Sound Designer

I think one of the problems at the moment is there's too many different sounds. You can't learn the language of it, because there's a completely different sound for every different thing that goes wrong. Simplifying that down to...

Phil Peers-Smallwood · Lead Sound Designer

Yeah, that's a really good point, because we've got dialogue assets to convey messages about the ship and what the situation is. We've also got the UI notifications of what the HUD's telling you is happening, and then we've also got the sound effects of what's happening and stuff like that. And sometimes they're all stepping over each other, and some dialogue assets are too long for the action, like proximity warnings. It's like, "Danger, you're about to crash into something on the left," and then you've already done it, kind of thing. So just deciding what needs voice, what needs sound effects and what needs UI.

Josh Bell · Sound Designer

Also, the diegetic warnings that you're getting shot at and stuff are something that we're constantly changing the mix of and trying to get right, like for the sound of bullets whizzing by the ship and the sound of impacts and stuff: how loud should they be? How loud should friendly ships near you be versus enemy ones? Should the one that you're targeting be louder, or the one that's targeting you be louder? We're constantly trying to find the sweet spot with that.

Graham Philipson · Lead Audio Programmer

We are pushing to improve that whole experience as a pilot in a ship in Star Citizen. A lot of the time we find ourselves supporting every single feature and then moving on to the next feature. And now there's a bit of a push to look at that experience as a whole and improve it and make it a much better gameplay experience.