Inside Star Citizen: This Sounds Like Ship

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:04

   I've often said that audio is the one thing that you can play a game without you don't notice audio until it's not there you can watch a movie or play a game without a sound you would only have a perfect experience I would say the challenge for us is to make it worth listening to our sounds listening to our work we've really got to earn the attention we try to make games sound natural and the less you hear it the better it is for us because it means you are into this world and it's believable I think that was one of the main aspects to making a ship the Arts makes it looks really good the props make it looks believable from the inside but when it comes to audio when

2. 00:00:51

   the audio is done this is really what it's bring to life cheap Ambience is like pretty much everything that happens when you walk inside your ship sounds you can hear that makes it a space basically if you were to consider ambience in painting the ambience for us would be represented as the first layer of paint the background on which we apply much more detailed and curated Strokes of flow and interest we call that a bed because that's the thing you really you lay on basically you rely on that to make it believable and it's one thing you don't really hear you don't pay attention to it but it's there and it makes it believable as a space you're in and you can really sell the immersion of a ship presently this is all done by hand and

3. 00:01:41

   it takes a lot of time so myself and Corrington I've banded together to make overarching systems which will take less input and make all the ship systems unified and in turn these ambiances will become already generated on the ship at runtime because we know how a drag Chip's supposed to sound we know how a mess chips are supposed to sound we can Implement that before the ship even exists in order to save us time and then allow us to spend more time on the really characterful elements the thrusters the moving Parts anything that really brings that higher level of quality to the ship at the end [Music]

4. 00:02:56

   so with physicalized components we thought it would really be a good idea to have them be the center of attention for the rework of sheep ambiances meaning you can have all sorts of different components in your ship shield generator power plants all that stuff these Woods have sounds attached to them being reactive and all that stuff depending on what you do in your shed and that would then fill all the space inside a ship we envisioned the excitement of a player switching on the Quantum Drive and hearing the Quantum fuel traveling through the pipes from the fuel tank and bind into the Quantum Drive before you engage Quantum travel and hearing that surge back with a backfire towards the quantum fuel tank and then you feel

5. 00:03:44

   the inertia of the ship traveling forward at a great speed which really make the player feel like they're on a moving ship going through space this would modulate depending on the amount of energy you use during your flight sessions so if you would if you were to work around your ship if the pilot is going really fast and using a lot of different systems the sound would react to that and create more busy Ambience if you would walk to the actual component itself you would hear it in action live moving from the inside out we moved to

6. 00:04:49

   thrusters thrusters really convey the propulsion of the ship going forward as a pilot or passenger you should be able to know or feel what the ship is doing and how it's traveling through space regardless of where you are on the ship we need to tell players that are maybe starting Cargo in the cargo bay which direction the player is traveling are you rolling are you evading enemies we wanted to rework that to make it more up-to-date with the new systems especially Master modes the idea was that in um combat mode your ship must be more reactive much more aggressive with a limited speed range so that's what we were trying to express with in the thrusters wherein we have multiple modes of flight which

7. 00:05:36

   really affect how the thrusters work sonically you would hear less filtering like more high frequencies it would be you would feel the weight of your ship when going really fast you want to hear that you are in combat and this is the thing that maintains you living basically so yeah you want to you want to take care of that ship foreign [Applause] ly today impact things colliding with

8. 00:06:32

   the hull of the ship the plan for impact is to move to a more localized descriptive version of what we have currently when you are in combat uh when you get hit you want to know how you got his and where you got hit so that's where the rework of impacts comes come into place you need to know exactly where you got hit and at what extent if your ship got badly damaged this needs to be communicated impact from ballistics laser weapons and bullets will tell the player the sound on the exterior of the ship whereas vibrations will give more information about the stress that that impact is having on the ship all these things are affecting the whole of the ship and we need to sort of let the player on board know whether they're a pilot or not what sort of environment they're flying through

9. 00:07:21

   crashing is a big thing that audio doesn't support well at the moment we are trying to make that right especially crashing into grounds lending all the all these uh interactions with bigger objects we want to reflect that and we want to make sure that your passengers will know if you make slight flight mistakes let's say you'll be aware that your pilot's doing a good or bad job depending on the debris are the impacts that are happening on the hull and you can let them know that they're not doing particularly well so that was a glimpse of the many things

10. 00:08:25

    we're working on for ship experience and we really are trying to bring this experience to the next level so all together what we call the ship experience is greatly improved by these overarching systems which play back and forth within each other allowing the player to really feel that they're in a living breathing ship and that their ship is unique amongst other ships you might have another Loadout with the components to someone else with the identical ship and this will make your Sonic experience unique in which other games really can't portray we hope you'll enjoy all the new stuff we bring in the future so what do we learned this week well hopefully between the Claudia show and this we've showcased just a little bit

11. 00:09:12

    about why audio is so important to creating a truly immersive experience for our players why it can be an important means for Pilots passengers engineers and attackers alike to gauge a situation and respond appropriately and that the audio experience continues to be improved and iterated upon just like any other aspect of Star Citizen so for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckabee thanks for letting us share the process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next week did I get everything on the list yeah I think so