Sound seems to have been greatly improved in 3.7. Could you summarize the work that was done?
TL;DRThe audio team credits improved tools and dynamic mixing, which focuses on the closest or most important ships and turns down the rest for a cleaner mix and better frame rate.
Well, we start off with a massively talented audio team, and the guys are really good at what they do, and they'll see issues and jump on hotfixes and stuff, but primarily we're just supporting the upstream features and content that comes down the pipe. And the tech and tools are constantly improving, because we work closely with audio programmers, so they help us get sounds in, streamline the process and stuff, so we can have more time to spend on iteration and stuff like that.
I think in the past few patches we introduced a lot of dynamic mixing things, didn't we? In the past, I think, if there were like 25 ships on screen at once, you'd hear them all and it would just kind of become a bit of a mushy soup of sound. Now we can focus in on the ships that are the closest to you or otherwise the most important and just play those ones and turn the rest of them down and all that kind of stuff. So it'll seem cleaner and more punchy, when really there's just actually less stuff going on. More focused mix, yeah.
Yeah, so a less-is-more approach, which is partly about making the mix cleaner, and it's also partly about optimizing the game, because we want to preserve your frame rate as much as we possibly can.