Star Citizen Live: Audio Team Q&A

1 July 202201:04:321,789 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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this is for the youtube let me redo the intro hi everybody welcome to star citizen live audio team q a i'm disco and i'm doing this twice because i forgot to start the recording but the youtube people will never know uh if you've never seen star citizen live before it's where we take about an hour out of the end of our week and we hang out with some of our developers uh this week uh for their first time in 2022 uh the members of the cig audio team out of uh out of manchester how you doing everybody i don't usually have an even number of people to fill the screen uh we we've got jack say hi jax hello uh graham say hi grant hello and uh brazzolo you can't see it but his team's thing
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never mind um so i'm not in my normal hour so i'm a bit off what are we doing today what are we doing today let's introduce the members of the team and see what you do for the team let's start with you graham who are you and what do you do for star citizen i'm graham flipson and i'm the lead audio programmer the star citizen and squadron 42 what's a lead audio programmer do um so mostly programming but also telling other people what to program too uh so they'll call the stuff that needs to be programmed get programmed at least that's how it's supposed to work hey you program that list for me now no it's much more kind of uh do you mind programming this for
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me to get good facts okay uh uh jack with the flickering webcam which just started uh who are you and what do you do for star citizen hey yeah so i'm jack i'm a sound designer on the project and that is what i do but for someone who doesn't know what a sound designer does what what does a sound designer do yeah so we're responsible for so offering the sounds themselves so that could be designing weapon sounds or spaceship sounds or anything like that um so that's one half of the job and then the other half of it would actually be implementing the audio and getting it to work in the game so it interacts um live with the player input so you're responsible for the way that a a big gun goes exactly yes okay uh uh uh bob who are you and what do you do for star citizen i get a recording of
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that oh you're not you're not gonna be able you're not dude once once we're in the same office you're not gonna be able to stop me i'm gonna be in there like i still want to do this i still want to do the april fool's artisanal sounds thing where it just replaces all the sounds of the weapons and the ships and everything with just my voice yeah what do you do for something bob oh sorry okay i'm bob solo uh i'm dialogue lead and um dialogue lead well that's uh yeah just work with all the dialogues all the character audio all the uh background audio uh for dialogue um that makes the full dialogue landscape we um you know go record them make them sound nice and and as jack mentioned about implementation getting it to work well in the game
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can you tell me where my voice sounds like this yeah that's a nice reverb you got there i wasn't sure if you were going to hear it over the over the stream it actually worked that was good all right so uh for this hour we're doing an open-ended q a with members of of the audio team remember that uh the audio team is much bigger than just the three you see here so so if the particular member of the team that has the particular answer for your particular question uh isn't here uh we may not be able to you know answer every single query but we got a nice little diverse group of designers and programmer and whatever the heck bob does so we're going to jump right in you can submit your questions in the twitch chat now by posting your question with the
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word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets and then uh while that's those questions are coming in we will go to our thread that we put up earlier this week that allowed people to submit their questions and then a vote on which ones they wanted to see at it most um right off the bat we're going to start with uh the last time that we really saw the audio team was at digital citizencon last year where we introduced claudius this brand new tool that's going to reshape the way that i mean frankly everything everything is made for star citizen as far as audio wise um how's that been coming along in the last almost year since we saw it um yes i'll take that since it's uh my baby's guess um so we've been progressing steadily uh what we showed back at citizencon was a tech demo and
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as you know sort of tech demos are knockoff we're sort of fully rounded finished features so what we were showing was some of the design decisions we've made about how claudius was going to work and we demonstrated a little bit of that but one of the big decisions that we made behind claudius was that every single audio feature becomes systemic and that's a huge undertaking it means that we've got to go through every single game system that exists right down from the tiny little things like the jukebox all the way up to capital ships and everything in between every single feature and we have to implement those features in the tool in claudius and in the underlying sig audio engine that allows us to make all of those features available to designers uh where they choose to put them so it's
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a really big sort of uh undertaking we're making really good progress on it and we're hopeful um it's only going to be a few more months before we can actually release something with claudius acted inside the build um that won't be where claudius is actually driving the whole audio of the game because that's the sort of the longer term goal is to replace every system but things are progressing really well we've got some really great features coming in um i do hope that we can talk about it again another video maybe so yeah you know a few months time or something i'm not sure when it will be but yeah we've got uh we got a lot of really good plans for it and we want it to be um a real sort of revelation for designers when it comes out so we're not releasing it until it's ready to be used so that's the big thing that's it's still kind
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it's not under wraps as such but it's just uh it's still germany and and uh uh backers and watchers of the show are used to hearing the word release apply to things to the moment when they get their hands on it you're of course talking about a release internally to when folks like jack you know over here get to get to use it and like many of our uh uh procedural or systemic tools you know it's not designed to take the work away from the designers and do the work for them but just provide them more tools and more capabilities uh in order to be more efficient and more successful in the creation of of their content yeah yeah i did it really certainly
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sorry no i was just going to say just really quickly to kind of chime in it's really about letting the creatives be creative i mean what what happens when you don't have a great tool set or a tool set that that that's uh you know quite aged it it uh it's there's a lot of extra work that has to go into getting what you want out of it and it's it's a lot of time sync it's it's just a lot of faff and so you know the sound designers they have to spend a lot of time in that world when you know they it's it would be much better for them to be doing more creative work and so that's that's really the whole meaning behind this is just to get the creatives to do more creative work and that's that's that's the big key yeah the way i put it is it's uh the whole design is workflow first so we look at a good workflow and then we build all the infrastructure behind it
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that allows it to happen uh as members of the audio team commander deckard would like to know when will server meshing be done that's an interesting uh question to ask the audience uh uh here's one that comes i i i'm pretty sure we have to go back to the tape but i'm pretty sure this question has come up every single time you guys have been on scl will we get sonic booms that's a slightly different question to what we've been asked in honest i think people quite often ask the question about speed of sound and we talk about why it's not something that uh mostly for gameplay reasons for uh player response times and things like this we choose not to implement it and it's really a game-playing decision um but sonic boom
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specifically i mean there's no reason why we couldn't do that we could uh we can allow sonic booms we can play them with the correct sort of speeds and depending on atmospheric pressure and things like this and so yeah we could absolutely implement that but what we would probably not do with it is respects the speed of sound distance from the sonic boom to the listening device and why not again mostly because we need to make the same decision across the whole game so that everything knits together nicely and for gameplay reasons that decision is not to have speed of sound delays i'm not ruling it out entirely it's not impossible to to implement but it is much more of a gameplay decision because it affects so
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many aspects of young play yeah it's worth remembering that there are many many many many aspects of star citizen but there are not all it's it's you know some things that are that are in some games are made possible because those games specialize in certain you know specific aspects of the sci-fi or the space going experience and what on star citizen aims to create a a sandbox uh that as many people with as many different desires and drives and attitudes can play in at once so the i'll put our features set up against anybody's but at the same time there won't be every single little thing that you see in every other game oh here's
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here here here's some fire here here's some here here's some uh here's some feedback uh when in combat it feels like there's a lack of sound or direction of where the shots are hit and the direction they come from and how it affects my ship are there planned improvements to the immersion of sound effects to better help combat situations i can answer this yeah oh great you got it that's cool you go jack had any additional info at the end yeah i was just going to say um so it's definitely something we want to look into um for sure um it's probably something that um when propagation comes online but um it's likely to become easier at that point um but yeah that's still tech graham's working on so probably take over from there
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it is an interesting question actually because although the propagation tech will uh improve understanding of direction in some situations it can also make it more difficult in others because if you're in ship combat and you're in uh first person so your view is within the ship a lot of what you might hear maybe resonance from the outside of the ship which is a little bit less easy to log in um so maybe we need to be offering options there uh when it's all stuff that we look into once we have a fully working propagation system but i would expect that kind of that sound to propagate partially directly but also um there'll be a lot of diffusion around it as well and we've been talking about the audio propagation for uh for some time now and uh
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obviously you mentioned it it can often it will get affected by things like atmosphere and pressure and stuff like that the next question says are there any plans for players to immediately hear when they are entering a room the difference between vacuum or atmosphere due to how the sounds are propagated through the suit so there are a few aspects that are necessary to uh be completed aspects of the tech that need to be complete before that can actually happen right now the audio system fully supports the pressure within any space and if the space is depressurizing that information is passed on to the audio system and it's available to sound designers to express that through their sounds and we do do that um you can
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uh in certain circumstances depressurize some of our ships and you can be sort of firing a weapon inside it and you can hear the difference as it depressurizes but that system isn't fully operational there's a lot of work that needs to be done on the room system to allow true sort of transfer pressure and balance of pressurization across multiple rooms and atmospheres planetary atmosphere and all these kinds of things so that's work that i'm involved in in in conjunction with other things and we are progressing so yes the short answer is yes i could have just said yes and we do plan to support that yeah there's no way we fill up the hour if you just say yes oh here's another old favorite uh any
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plans to support surround sound five one seven one dolby at most as far as i can tell star citizen currently uses up mix stereo leaving the center channel of a 5-1 setup mostly silent and the surround speakers mirror the front speakers which makes the soundscape just stereo instead of actual surround what the hell this was an interesting question because i guess for the to a large extent we've all been working from home on headphones everything sounds as it should right because we've got a left and a right and that's all you need because you've only got two ears if you're on that side of the argument which we're not obviously so um surround is fully supported by both our engine and um the wise engine that we use the middleware that we use
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um and i think we will have to investigate why this user is experiencing what they're experiencing because we do probably support 5.1 or 7.1 as output mods in wise and it may just be there's some sort of setup issue there but it's definitely something that's not so easy for us to check when we're mostly at home on headphones so um yeah we can we can we will dig into that one because uh it came a little surprised to hear that question there are a couple of folks in the live chat who are confirming it's their experience as well so that is very good to know and we will um treat that one as critical be exciting to get back into your your your your new audio spaces in the new uh in the new offices yeah the new
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building i was actually going to kind of touch on that too i mean that's even the space that i'm here in in freedom house i mean these the room here is too small for a 5.1 um and most of our spaces here are we do have the you know apollo and we're able to do 5.1 in there um but as as graham says still a lot of us are still you know working from home so but the new office you know each of our pods will be 5.1 and the the the new mix space there is going to be a flagship 7.1 uh uh you know um at most still the at most and it's going to be a fantastic room to do to do proper mixing in and to you know i mean part of the thing too is authoring content in the 5.1 i mean we don't have the tools at the moment to to really author that content as well in that kind of sense so it's
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there's a lot of it that's just really for for us as designers to to get in there and be able to have proper spaces and proper tools to to really make that 5.1 experience shine and and as graham also said debugging and testing you know [Music] all right uh let's see here's another old chestnut in-game radio that's all it says in-game radio question question mark uh currently that'd be super cool i mean are we talking like real songs from now or made up songs from the future this question comes up uh uh quite frequently uh there are a number of ways to to do this kind of thing you know
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whether whether it's you know the gta style where we license a bunch of music and curate it you know on on rate on individual radio stations just let people tune in uh and play to that uh whether we contract out with folks and create an entirely original selection of 30th century rock songs or whatnot to the thing or what a lot of people tend to ask is the ability to broadcast their own radio and then that ends up you know opening up a whole another can of worms uh with with uh between legal and content rights i'm sure most people who are watching on twitch right now are no stranger to the to the twitch uh situation with the riaa and playing music if i mean if you had an in-game radio station that
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you could run the whole purpose of it was that you would want other people to hear it so if you could if you were playing star citizen and then you turned a corner and then you heard somebody else's radio station playing a song that the riaa is currently looking out for on twitch and you were streaming at the time you get your channel banned because you know this person over here was was streaming there are lots of lots of considerations for that kind of stuff it's not a hard no it's not a hard no the the situation's always changing and evolving and stuff like that and there's there's all manner of new tech solutions that that come we we do have we do have uh old backers will remember the jukebox in the in the player hangers uh that lets you play your own mp3s in the hangar and it radiated through their own personal hanger and stuff so so it's not to say
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that there's not some middle ground to uh to be found i can at least say that from from narrative's point of view from from dave haddock he is definitely been out there interested in in uh you know having lord having actual you know musicians and music in fiction in in star citizen so we do we do expect to have you know that music in in there whether we'll have enough or how long would it take to get enough to kind of warrant a full-on in-fiction radio station we'll see right but but at least you know there will be expectations of having more in fiction music so uh and and artists and and that are actually part of the universe rather than just us composing what we think 30th century uh music would be as we all know in the future music is
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all generated by ai anyway so um i think we just need to you know we just create some ai we just generate hundreds of hours of the world's greatest dj in the 30th century is dj dali and he's he's moved from image generation to just straight music generation based on a string a sentence string and it is terrible you're much enormous it is terrible um but i uh it it just just uh in case the answer sounds like a like a no and folks get uh you know disheartened i will say that this comes up internally so often like like bob just said speaking on behalf of dave haddock and stuff uh i have to imagine based on how long i've been here and the people that i work with that something will happen at some point like it's just another diegetic a
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ver a very immersion immersion-building aspect of this universe we're trying to build so i can't tell you what form or shape it's going to end up in ultimately but there's too many people here who want something for something never to materialize yeah i really hope to get the opportunity to record some 30th century space rock as well we'll just play that uh we'll play that big benny's uh uh uh song that roster ginza and i made just on loop over and over and over again um which you can hear on our youtube channel if you dig far enough okay is there a limit on how far we can hear sound effects distant gunfire and ship sounds are one
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of the most awesome things two of the most awesome things uh yeah so we tried scale sounds sort of based on real life values um so now every sound in the game will have an attenuation on it which determines the uh distance the total distance the sound can travel then the further away you get from the source um it will start tailored taking off from volume and um filter down as well um so yeah we're already doing that in the game yeah i think the suggestion in the question might be that they want to hear more of the distant stuff and i think we have some uh plans in the tech involved in sig audio and claudius that will allow us to be more responsive to situational differences and you know based on the context of the game we might be more distant space battles if there isn't
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a close by space battle going on at the same time i think so um yeah it's all part of that design so give us uh plenty of time and some time we can make improvements in that area as well in some cases too it is actually a bit of a different content too we have to you know have different content for those different contextual switches in some cases to really get it to shine properly and mix right and and all those things so it's it's not just as simple as taking a gun sound and just that gun sound being that far away you know it could be uh as graham said you know having that claudius will really help us uh with crowding and distancing and doing things in a much more efficient manner as well um here's another question i think the answer is going to have to touch on some of that in-game radio stuff will we have
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a pa-like system in our ships that actually i remember that question last year uh that is definitely something i personally feel pretty passionate about yes yes there will be yes and we've actually made progress on that tech so we last last time we spoke about it we were starting to get it to the point where we had um some of these dynamic events with these mission-driven pas uh being broadcasted into multiple locations and off off of speaker arrays and things like that and that was uh i was taking kind of the fundamental basics of how this would work having a source being broadcasted across uh two to multiple receivers and uh since then with this last uh you know what's his last fleet week and uh siege horse and uh we've uh we've uh uh pushed that further and did some more robust work with it you know i mean there's still
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next steps after that would be to have a bit more finer detail on the types of pa and the speaker arrays and and so we can have better detail between like a hallway pa versus a broom versus like the the bigger hangers and things like that you know uh and and then next after that is to take it to to an actual ship you know we've been doing these mostly in locations and whatnot so now we need to take a ship as an example as a prototype and do it there um what would probably be the source would be the ship computer so we'll look at like warnings and crits that would you would want to send to the whole ship for for example right now when you get a ship computer response it's like warning crit like your ship's gonna explode that's only going to the pilot the pilot operating seat so we would like for that to actually like like this is suggesting how the pa broadcast the ship uh and tell the whole ship that you know
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you're about to blow up uh but uh uh you know that's that's gonna take that prototyping and then you know as you can probably imagine taking that one markup for that one ship and putting it across our whole fleet of ships that's gonna be quite an undertaking you'd like to do that the most efficient way as well um but one step further is to take it so it's not just a you know the ship computer or any kind of system voice doing that is that to give the player interaction to actually speak into this pa in in a targeted room like for example they they've just rescued some guy and he's in their their cargo bay you can actually you know say i'm talking directly to cargo bay say hey welcome welcome to my ship you know blah blah and have it come out this pa speakers and and uh um that person like oh cool thanks you know uh and what not so you know it's uh that kind of level
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of detail is really what we're after and as you can see it's gonna take a few iterations of tech and steps to get there but uh we're on our way and we've been making progress and and you're pretty clear all you can pretty clear on that all the way up until you get to the parts where players can speak over it at that point you run into the same considerations in-game radio has now in your rarely broadcast you know server wide or whatever but this is still the ability to sing and change your virtual microphone to an mp3 out and and blast music over your spaceship and stuff so so it's it's it's just one of those things like i want to say it's it's you've got for folks who want it you have a
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tremendous champion and brazillo here and yeah well we'll have to see if it if it's something to be kind of more client or if it's that a person in your group or something and not like to the uh to the full-on server but yeah you're right though that open mic can be received at this time i mean it happens to some extent in voice over ip2 i was just going to say i mean it's taking that already existing voiceover ip and making it yeah kind of in game in world so i i would hope that still works out yeah well when it's loud enough for other people to hear it anyway what's the deal with that is that sorry i said what's the deal with that mr question half the time i see voice over ip it's so low other people can't hear it like we need more volume control yes so we um we actually made some uh
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some progress on this quite some time ago and um what we need is a new menu to be created where a player can go in and speak into their mic and they can monitor their level and then they can set their transmission level and the audio tech for this exists we just need to work with other teams to get it working in the ui and in the the menu and uh we should be able to make improvements in that area um there is no reason beyond that why anyone should be any quieter than anyone else because uh they're all being through the same setup obviously you have attenuations so if you if you're not in a chat channel a voice channel with somebody then you're going to just hear them naturally and you have to be very close to them to hear that because it becomes on us very quickly if we if
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we have to go up on that kind of thing and we have had those problems a few people communicating over voip and uh having you know uh bachmann turner overdrive plastic out in the background and that's all anyone can hear when you walk past that person so yeah it's all about ruins really central park and fall uh while we're talking the voice communications uh any chance we get filters or uh new variables uh what ways to alter or or otherwise yeah yeah i mean we already do it essentially in uh in from the npc's standpoint i mean if you go to like uh was it the was it lauraville or uh anywhere you have the security guards where they have mask on and you can hear them through the mask little darth vadery kind of sounds i mean that that's essentially a a disguise filter that i've put on
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their voice as a runtime effect so it's not something i've baked in there they if they if they were to uh remove their masks they would you would hear them speak their normal voice so um uh you know it is something that that is already done but again it's it's one of those things where we have the tech it's working now we need to have that player interaction and that player choice and be able to put it on the voiceover ip so that we can have them use it and and and do that as well so it's just moving that bar and extending it to uh to players you know it is definitely something i would like to do and also look into you know offering a lot obviously more more uh um uh variations and allowing people to kind of almost you know do work you know giving them enough play with it that so that they can kind of design and play
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and make their own disguise you know yeah tech wise i think you know this is uh i'll keep talking about sigordi and claudius but the whole design of this is that we allow um basically the design of audio but it's getting to become more of a playground more of a place where a designer can play around and make interesting things and there's absolutely no reason why um voice effects could be you know couldn't be one of these things that is uh offered by the the new audio engine once it comes online so yeah maybe one day we'll have lots of people wandering around uh and while we're on voice chat um in-game voice has several bugs that have persisted for years after a while of playing individual single directed links drop out so if a b and c are in a party a stops hearing b but b can still hear a
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c can hear everybody and it's progressive so more and more links drop out as time goes by and sometimes a player gets extremely low volume for no reason even when talking over radio uh anything you can anything you can you you can any hope you can you can give the the there's always hope um to fix all these things you need all you need are time and resources and determination and uh we've certainly got the last one of those three um but the big issue with with voip is the amount of testing time the amount of repro time it takes and you know we've we've spent days uh attempting to reproduce these issues and either have no success or you know just have they just kind of work or you know we've always not been able to track down
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what is causing these issues we do continue to look into it and it is always on our plan to improve because um we want it to be 100 reliable system that people feel like they can go to not need to fall back to other third-party chat applications and things like that so yes absolutely we we do continue to look into it and we've made over the last year we've made some huge stability improvements from what people are saying it's not quite there yet but that's the problem is you know we fix the big issues and then you get to the smaller ones and the smaller ones and you get the deeper you go the longer it takes to get to the point where you can figure out what's happening before you can fix it and the thing about the voip system and then fight as a whole is it's a hugely complex infrastructure that goes way beyond just um recording
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some voicing game and passing it down to the game server and then propagating it to the players it's like we have completely separate voice servers that they don't even rely on you being on the same game server so when server message comes online and your friends on a completely different server when they're transitioning between servers this this is all infrastructure we've built that allows that to be seen so you can you can still communicate when you're transitioning between different servers we have all this complexity that was very forward thinking and you know some of this complexity is some is part of the reason why some of these bugs exist but it's the right thing to do because long term we also know with a system that satisfies our future needs as well as our present ones as don steeler gaming says certainly
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sounds like a tough problem nice don't blame me blame dawn's dealer in chat uh bob what are the plans to have more npc background chatter or general hubbub in populated areas oh yes yes yes yes so the last couple uh locations have really i think we've done a a much better job i think i mean we started out the first test cases of really improving this was the cargo and refinery decks which were location uh uh generic and uh they um uh it really had a great positive uh uh addition to it right i mean i hope we knew that but it was uh um i was really kind of trying to dissect and adding you
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know we had you know the dialogue landscape has a foreground and you know actual ai interacting you know words coming out of the ai's mouth and that but then you have you know sight unseen this middle ground that the chatter that they're kind of referring to that uh that we've really been focusing on it doesn't have a it doesn't have any other stimuli other than that you're in a populated space and you want it to have that uh uh immersion and that that feeling that there's life there when maybe there's not really anything actually triggering it and that was a big thing that we did with these spaces um the one last thing is is the the base the very background um walla which is that indiscernible it's almost like a sound effect of of dialogue just kind of filling the space and we've we've added the you know uh uh layers of that but it's still this static-y type thing that that's just for that these spaces and and uh we did this
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i think really well with uh orizon where he went and picked out these densely populated areas that we knew that would pretty much usually have that type of population and it were able to add those chatters um so you had the dialogue even if the even if the ai wasn't there really you know actually acting and vocalizing and and we had the the the walla in the background so it's these layers kind of compounding together that gives you a dialogue landscape and a feeling of life but it's all still you know very uh us attacking these spaces and and whatnot right um and we're actually we've taken this and orzon being a very good um a full prototype of of doing that for a whole location we're now going back to like lauraville and some of these other locations and really trying to uh fill
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them out as well so so we we've taken this in in in our now are kind of um generating more and more and it's it's really helping we've hit the hospitals with some some vignetti type chatter we want to do the the uh um the the habs as well uh especially they're gonna find some cool stuff you'd like walking through the halls and hearing some weird stuff especially the more fun locations like grimace and get some cool stuff in there and pyro is going to be fun too coming up with a lot of that kind of outlaw uh stuff that's actually where we're hoping to get a lot of the dialogue life uh out of there because we we won't have as much character content for such a new location right so it's going to be really uh the that middle ground and that um of background will really help help with those spaces but our future we would really like to have more of these like a
00:35:27
dynamic wallace system that can not not just you know say that this is a space that has population and so we should treat it as such but to to actually look at the populations and dynamically look because it's not just an npc's roaming around it's players and we want to you know make sure that that if if you stand in a room with a bunch of players that that actually also feels like a densely populated space and you don't know when that's going to happen it's going to be very dynamic and whatnot and it's going to have a mood it's going to have a uh you know again the population and all those things so we want to in a you know a dynamic of of the types of populations in there right so it's it's it and we'll take stems and we'll take a a a lot of source of wallet and mix it appropriately to
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have you feel like that's the space that you're in and and that's going to take a lot of content it's going to take a lot of tech and a lot of prototyping a lot of work on it but we we have almost started the process we're getting there we have we have some big to be honest we have some big choices to make with the type of software that we want to use because part of part of the big thing that we want to do with creating so many assets is using uh uh texas speech and speech to speech and using these kind of tools to help bolster what recordings we already have and things like that and really to help us generate the right amount of content without having to go and record record and record and record uh a bunch of wallace sessions so so it's it's uh um we're looking at that tech right now and we have we need to make and it's quite a you know pretty substantial a decision
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to for for monetary to to make that kind of decision so we need to do our homework we need to do our research we need to compare and weigh against and and all those things so we're at that level at the moment where we're about to engage with some good research and then once we pick that then we can really start to move on with uh with getting a proper wallace system in there one and whatnot so that's that's why i kind of flowered on there but um as a follow-up to that uh when you're talking about investigating softwares and text-to-speech and stuff uh shaney in the live chat asked uh have you been looking at a.i generated voices for like third-tier nbc's like the atc uh google's latest ai voice tech sounds amazing this person said yes i mean that that is definitely a very good
00:37:52
point we we can do that for for npcs i mean mostly our our target has been really for like the system voices uh uh you know like for i know there's a question down here and on ship computer voices so i don't make it safer for that but but uh you know a lot of system voices that are especially having a lot of incremental game design and so it's like we can't you know it's when we want to go record and cast and you know an actor and get them in it's we have a you know amount of amount of you know lines for them everything with the monetary and make it make sense go in there get get a much enough amount of content and then but you know some at some point later you'll want to have this new gameplay feature and in that that thing only has five lines and you're like okay well you know i need to call this actor up to have them come back in and record five lines or or if it's uh
00:38:40
you know work from home kind of studio whatever it is it's still that's that's they have you know basic minimum fees for sessions and it's just not financially viable so so we we especially just even for our iterative game devil might want to look at these ai uh creating voices and whatnot but we also would like to be able to still pick and choose our talent pick and choose the people we want to have in our game and so we we're looking at ways to be able to create our own voice packs and and say actor so-and-so person you're going to be the voice of this ship and we're gonna go capture your essence and be able to create a voice from you that we can then drive with our our text of speech or speech to speech is another thing that we've been looking into too where you uh someone can actually uh um you know take we can take a voice actor and
00:39:29
and you know a staff or or anybody else can can read off those lines in the way we like but it'll sound like that that person that we captured um and it's another way to to bolster content without having to to to hire talent for just five lines apiece but we you know obviously we still pay them these proper you know buyouts and proper licenses for their for their uh you know their voice it's not you know we we do make sure that the talent are treated well and that we we we do the all the right legal things with that and it it it has been adapting in the industry i mean we're not the only ones to kind of consider that right the film film is also looking at ways to to do better adr so you don't you know you can you have a project to film and you know there's there's requirements to say you can only adr 10 with these speech to speech things and and then you know
00:40:18
you're able to uh bolster it without having the the guy have to come in for five lines or something you know uh and and and that's that's that's benefit but we we obviously are are very keen on that and you know and we want to we want to push forward with these these uh um these ai or these you know these uh uh speech or text speech creating voices really you know have a lot more content to work with there are there are technical issues that need to be overcome though because i know um some of these ai generated uh speech samples do sound amazing but a lot of that ai is trained on natural language and it's trained on a known language and a lot of our language in law isn't known is a little bit tricky for some of these
00:41:09
things and it's really important we make sure we don't end up in any valley because i think when these ai generations get something wrong you can really hear that it's uh it's not a person speaking so yeah it's a lot of research last question from the chat for a bit we'll go back to the thread uh are you guys bringing tessa banister back i love tessa banister uh you know the the uh the actor um that our actress actor actress uh that that plays that role she she's she's phenomenal she's she's really sweet and and it was it was great to get her back in last time we had her and i i'm i'm sure we'll we'll have her and again i i can only imagine that she's being such a fan favorite and and a staff favorite we love working with her so
00:41:57
i would sure hope so you're not going to be able to hear this my system's stuck processing an unknown reading i'd love to be able to provide more information on my report than just like five question marks in a row i think you could take a look at what's at this location then you could take a look at what's in this location reading my god okay she kept going all right all right let's get back we got about 15 minutes left uh let's get let's let's do some so some rapid fire stuff here as we get through as many of these as possible um are there plans to make components sound off when they're having issues
00:42:48
performing correctly to help engineers identify non-critically damaged or faulty components quicker yes it's something we definitely want to look into it should be fairly simple in practice um we'll just need to assign a sound to each component and then tie that into a value to say how much i have health it has um so it's like what graham said earlier it's just a case of time and resources but yeah something we absolutely like to do uh let's see uh since audio in the void is computer interpreted uh if if if if we emp an area will the sound in spacesuits in that area stop getting sound from the outside that's the question for gameplay and gameplay design but uh we will offer the tech from the audio team to allow that if the game design wants
00:43:36
it i would like it i'd love it i'd love it i'd love to be able to just hear the sounds from within the suit if everything you know if the suit is dead uh as a as a follow-up to that besides an emp potentially disabling it any consideration or discussion about simply turning off the audio simulation uh willingly so that people can play in eerie spooky hard mode um yeah i think that'd be amazing thing to do as well and i think maybe we can offer against gameplay question but there could be some penalty for having your um audio simulation switched on it could be you may light up somebody's radar if you if you have this thing switched on so if you want to be stealthy you go accept no sounds or something like that i think that'd be really cool how come several soundscapes are gone
00:44:27
area 18 tram for example it used to beep and buzz and sounds like a bug so something we'll look into thanks for letting us know okay it's it's kind of key to note that that uh uh you know certain overarching implementations of systems and things like that do change over time and and quite often what happens is they they might something else might happen inexplicably and it will go unnoticed because it was working before uh and and it's always hard to kind of catch those things and gave the melon it really is it takes it you know that's that's that's really honestly why we have like you know qa and and and you know uh fans you know or you know community sharing these type of things happening because it really
00:45:14
helps us catch those kind of things when when when uh when it's we've done it and it worked and how do we know when it breaks it's also why we've got quite a big push going on internally for automatic testing so one of the things we're aiming for is uh knowing what the response to this particular gameplay situation should be from the audio system and confirming that is still the case wrong build to build but we're nowhere near um ready with that yet so even one day we'll have a system that can pick these things up before they go out when one system is developed one system and another system were developed in two separate branches and then they get together for the first time in game dev that's where bugs are born that's why i don't have children
00:46:02
that i know of um why are shutdown sounds for your ship so different from engine sounds it's not connected to the engine sound at all but a completely different sound effect um once again a risk of echoing um or repeating what i've already said it's sort of a time and resources thing um just due to the amount of ships we're working on and we sort of have a system set up already but works um but yeah i'm looking into tying up the startup and shutdown sounds um to the engine something we need to look into it will take a lot of time um so you have something hopefully for the future i think another thing is you know some of the tech we're working on is going to make it easier for you guys to hook into the state of the ship at the point where it shuts down so
00:46:50
yeah uh we've mentioned propagation a few times uh does that mean the doors and such will block sound yes absolutely so the propagation system has been uh long in development and that's because of the amount of rework and the bug that's had to go on to to support it fully reworking the room system and uh creating mapping for that room system and things like this and it's in progress now i have working demos and um it's one of the main things that it does from an audio perspective is respect when doors are opened and closed it also respects um angular angles of travel of sounds so you can kind of know and you can affect the way a sound sounds because of how many times you have to turn around the corner to get to your ears and you know we can kind of express a lot more about where the sounds are propagating grom
00:47:38
and to and conveyor through this system so yeah doors absolutely explode jared show the working demos of what what are you talking about i have working demos and i haven't shown anyone i'm like i don't i don't have any working demos we've had the same ship computer voices for variety for the various manufacturers for like 28 years now that might be embellishing for my own personal uh exhaustion are there plans to rec to re-record new lines for the ships to better fit the current and future mechanics star citizen is moving towards please do god say yes
00:48:27
yes now i kind of briefly touched on it with that other question talking about the uh the ai and having a um texas speech generating the voices and whatnot and that and that's a big proponent in this in this redesign we we have it on the plate to completely overhaul and completely redesign the ship computer voices and it really starts with that tech and getting buying into that tech and figuring out which one we're going to use from there we we not only do i mean though not only are we trying to improve the content that we're using but we also want to improve its role in in in everything and one of the things that's really important to us is unifying the warning and crit package uh across all manufacturers and the the the dialogue that's used there the um
00:49:17
the visual representation the sound effects representation all those three things kind of come together to really put together a complete experience for for how you would experience a warning in a crit and how they should operate and how how you would expect them to to function and in a lot of it we really want to look toward you know the military and actual jet fighter jets and how how they you know there's a lot of science that goes into these kind of award warnings and alerts and and we would like to you know treat it a bit more uh real world with that and get to get into involved in it with a bit more i mean still really cool but but uh uh you know we that is a huge you know a passion project for us to to really achieve a much better ship computer in that kind of sense and that and that's just one role you know definitely fixing and unifying that
00:50:04
specific experience but you know we would like to look at the you know um having a better uh a ship computer that that uh uh acknowledges the essence of the manufacturer or the luxury or the the military or the uh the uh utilitarian you know we we want to have uh uh you know it have that heart um and to really share that a bit better um but also one one extra thing too is i i personally would like to have some more ship computer roles relating to gameplay loops you know i feel like especially it'd be great to have uh um a ship computer based for exploration that that can really kind of touch on on the the systems and give you more information and and thoughts and the dangers and lurkings and all these things about about your exploration or maybe a ship computer voice that's more
00:50:52
detailed to combat to give you a an idea like oh you know a danger will robinson like that's that you're gonna you're heading into a dangerous uh a system uh or you're you're outnumbered uh there's a lot of ships that approaching and it's to a point where you know we sense that you're you're not going to be able to to to to succeed give the player a talent but but just you know that these these ideas are are in our heads the they we were really trying to put them down to paper and uh it's really obviously like i said it really takes getting the bright tech first um but all these things are on the table um and uh none of them have been fully signed off yet but it's really what we're seeing we're clearly seeing is that the ship computer currently does not fulfill the role that we would like to see it and so very much
00:51:40
we will be uh addressing this um as we sort out that deck i've always wanted there to be optional you know swap outs and stuff too like some that are more expensive than others and some that are really cheap like we missed our opportunity to get gilbert gottfried as like the as like the entry-level drake like drank combat assist turned on major torque and balance what does this mean i don't know what this means it's on the screen there's enough recordings of him jared to resurrect him believe me well they got apparently alexa can do that now so uh you can program like set over to speak in the voice of a dead loved one now so oh my goodness never mind we're we're going we're going to black mirror
00:52:28
stuff now and yes and yes that was a terrible gilbert godfrey impersonation i've never attempted one in my life before and i sh i wish that had still been the case in this moment um voice control i i i know this is another one that you're big on i'm going to turn this into the rizzola show voice control things like voice attack but you know in game it integrated our own kind of thing what are your thoughts oh oh for sure for sure i mean i actually i do correct me if i'm wrong i can't remember this was like quite a few years ago but i thought there actually already exists a couple third-party systems that third party yeah yeah you can do do for uh do for our shift so obviously that the tech is
00:53:15
there um it's just doing that tech internally for ourselves that's that's another a big undertaking uh but i would like to go one step further i mean one one of the big things that i really would like to see with uh with voice is that that your voice um you know uh interacts with the npcs like you know not only your ship and whatnot but if you're on the ground and you're walking through a location you can walk up to an npc and say hi and then they will say hi back to you because you registered that you greeted them and that you they can reach you back or simply just being able to you know you have the inner voice you know uh responses and instead of going there and having to click on one you can just say one of the responses and the npc will acknowledge that how cool would that be that that's like my passion i would like for something like that at some at some point but uh it is a quite
00:54:04
a big undertaking for the tech that we would need in there and um as you can see uh graham has quite a few uh uh big things on his plate already with claudius and propagation and whatnot so uh we'll yeah it would be some way down the list but you know it's like climbing a mountain isn't it let me just carry on at some point we reach the peak and maybe the peak is having ai that understands your speaking and understands what you're trying to express i refuse to use any of those things i don't i'm a technology person but i don't like talking to my crap i just don't all right we got five minutes uh let's see how many more we can squeeze in is binaural audio been considered we were talking about surround what about about this um yes so we have internally
00:54:53
tried out a few different hrtfs so we haven't settled on exactly what we want for our game yet and i think what we really want to do is get back into the get into the new studio get some solid work done on how the game sounds it's around and i think that is the basis for coming up with a decent binaural slash hrtf solution is knowing that what it's trying to express is good in the first place so um yeah i think we uh we've got some work to do with department uh but it it's all part of our uh research and it is ongoing okay uh when the ship was badly damaged the interior lights change will the audio team consider providing some alarms and ambient sound to match the damage status oh for sure um yeah good
00:55:43
no i'm sorry jack i was just like yeah well yeah yeah we already have some stuff in place um so like steam will come out and sparks and things like that we have audio support for that but yeah absolutely we should definitely look into things like alarms and things like that that's something we really love to we have to tread carefully with alarms because uh sounds that become annoying become annoying to use at tartology you want to hear the most annoying sound in the world uh can we please have five minutes of silence between songs no pedro all the time pedro who wrote this question and how did i let it get into my list suppose some people don't want music
00:56:33
going on all the time i'm sure you can look into that i'm sure you know i mean a a at a little breath i think you know it's quite often the breaths uh and silence in between dude is important i would have to say i think uh transitional and just giving giving the uh listener a break i think that's valuable it's it's it's a warranted uh request although we do love our music um but uh no you know and um yeah i mean there are there are locations too that we're considering to have a bit more ambient stuff too you know where it's not full-on melodies and whatnot you can give yourself a break there as well you can go to pyro or something uh are there plans for any of the abundance of cockpit switches to blast fortunate sun over the ship's pa no we're not we already that's done
00:57:24
i need to look closer at these questions before we do the show we can create an ai generated uh mimic unfortunately play me fortunate son will there be an echo in large ship interiors uh like the merchantman's giant cargo hall like you know like not a cargo hold a cargo hall yeah we were actually talking about this just last week about how one of the big things that we uh we need is a better early reflection system and that is what we're talking about here cargo i've always like yeah perhaps the sound reflects off um big square distant walls um so we are actively researching how we're going to implement this but as with everything star citizen it needs to work in every possible gameplay
00:58:12
situation in every scenario in every planet every bit of geometry and yeah that's always the challenge we face uh last two questions uh which audio element of the project have you found to be the most challenging to implement so far in a way a lot of it can be quite challenging just due to the multitude of tools we have um so this is something claudius is really going to help with where we sort of centralize all of that but at the minute um an audio designer can be jumping between maybe three or four different programs um to get sound working so um that's one of the harder bits of it um you don't have to say that because graham's here jack [Laughter] he's just trying to persuade me to release it more
00:59:00
quickly sorry how about you bob um no i i i definitely i would like to to relate with jack i mean especially for dialogue too it's it's uh it's going to actually be a little harder because unfortunately claudius will it will help with a lot of the non-character improvements uh uh i'll be honest but but still character dialogue does come from ai and it does come from subsumption and and uh you know a lot of that is a bit out of our our hands at the moment so getting more more support and getting more uh people from the dialogue team involved in that will really help us but but yeah sadly a lot of dialogue is kind of out of our hands of how it triggers because it's triggered by the ai and and with subsumption and things like that so it's just getting into that
00:59:47
black box for our department to to really help with it and to uh to expand on it and that that just takes more more people so if you want to join the dialogue we're always hiring classroomgames.com jobs a brand new facility to work in so uh and then last and perhaps the most important question we're going to answer here today will we ever be able to honk a horn on our spaceships yes i'm going to say yes i think draw a line in the sand make it happen graham yeah if you want to do this you know we can get into arguments about whether you should hear this horn in spain so whether you need to be an atmosphere to
01:00:34
hear all these kinds of things but yeah let's just say yes and an entire new sub component system of different horn types i just put it all on john crew and his team i'm sure they're up for it uh uh there will be a day when i can roll around in my buccaneer and blast la cucaracha just by there was someone on my street that would uh have a honk and it was the godfather i'm sure the ship team would have no trouble adding a whole new component to every single spaceship from now on i'm committing them to it with the power that i don't have all right everybody uh that's it thanks for um thanks for uh
01:01:23
joining us here on star citizen live uh the autumn q a uh thanks to jared the stream just got demonetized we don't demonetize we don't monetize our streams they're all demonetized we do this for the people isc is on hiatus isc will be back uh july 28th if i'm not mistaken uh be sure to check out yesterday's episode uh that covered a whole host of things uh coming to alpha 317.2 uh as well as uh some stuff uh uh you know some stuff that was intentionally uh left out but you're gonna wanna you know you could check out the spectrum and twitter folks have found some of the things that we didn't quite hint at there's even more uh that
01:02:11
have not been discovered uh just yet uh don't forget that the battle of the brics charity live stream where the community teams from eve and star citizen come together uh to raise money for extra life that is happening on july 22nd um so be sure to check that out um there's also a array of of uh of dynamic events that have returned uh to pass the time until 317-2 is out uh jumptown and ninetails uh adventure that doesn't sound right tails lock down line tails lock down if i were a professional i'd have written all this out before but um that's going on right now you can
01:02:58
check out the robertsspaceindustries.com website to see the schedule of when when when those are running and uh and yes if you haven't heard uh there is a wipe coming with 317.2 uh to deal with you know the various auc and ship exploits that that have happened over the last uh patch or two so this is your chance to jump into jumptown and ninetales and just go hog wild because no fear losing anything i want to get in there and have the craziest wildest adventure uh possible because why not why not uh so for that's everything that's it and then uh we'll be right back here with star citizen live next week uh i don't actually remember who's on the show i can remember everybody else's
01:03:46
stuff but i don't remember my own i'm in a good place right now that's that's uh jack that was graham that was brazzolo uh thank you for joining us here with the audio qa team uh take care everybody uh uh uh be safe and um have fun in the verse all right where's my button there it is hold on let me do one more i do do more tessa not to sound mysterious or anything but i'm picking up some really weird pings on my scanners i don't know if you'd want to check it out and tell me what the hell it is i would myself but you know i can't leave i'm sorry it's only been eight years you'd think i'd be better at this but no

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.