Ships are getting new cockpit display systems. What are we doing to improve the ship sound effects inside the cockpit as well, to match the visuals?
TL;DRAfter consulting an air force engineer, they plan to use a small set of consistent warning sounds, backed by the new annunciator panels showing the specific issue visually.
Well, for this one we actually reached out to the community, and we were speaking to an engineer from the Australian Air Force. And yeah, we talked for over an hour about the warning systems, the audio systems you get in aircraft and stuff like that. Historically, we started to try and design a UI sound for every different type of UI notification you can get in a ship. Like a missile's locked onto you, you're locked onto someone else, there's enemies nearby, all that kind of stuff. And it becomes like a language that you have to learn. And if we change that per manufacturer and per ship, then you've always got to relearn this language. In real life, the aircraft have a very limited amount of audio warnings. It's like major, all the way up... major?
It's like minor warning, major warning, critical or something.
And that's where the annunciator panel comes in. It's like, hey, something critical, you look down, and then visually it tells you what the actual specific issue is. So with the introduction of the annunciator panels, it allows us to clear that up and come up with a very clear, intuitive sound design to support that.