Star Citizen Live: Audio Team Roundtable

16 April 202101:02:401,847 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:01
hey everybody welcome to another episode of star citizen live audio table audio table what was it what's that audio team round table we're off to a good don't laugh at me i'm going to put your faces there sitting here laughing at me already i'm your host jared huckabee and 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 put our developers on the spot yes we pull them from their important work and make them answer questions from you the star citizen viewer on the show this week esteemed members of our audio team and phil so let's go around the table and introduce us tell everybody who you are and what you do for the star for star citizen phil we'll go ahead and start with you go ahead hi i'm just phil uh i'm the uh lead sound designer
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for the audio team lead sound designer what does the lead sound designer do um so i'll i'll take the direction from uh darren lamborn the audio director and i'll work with the the sound designers um the other audio disciplines in the team like audio code graham here and we've got dialogue we've got bob um and uh we'll just work together to try and make sure we're hitting our milestones and making sure the creative vision the technical vision is kind of achieved in game night graham who are you and what do you do for star citizen hello i'm graham philipson i'm lead audio programmer and it's nice to be at this table again look i was not hired because i could speak clearly it's like okay i mean i certainly wasn't either so the the hosting parts are the parts that
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everybody sees but that's not actually my job this is this is the thing that i do on the on the side stuff uh what explain what a programmer a a programmer uh how does an audio programmer differ from an audio designer so an audio program is very much about implementing the the vision of the audio designer and attempting to sort of uh model the real world sound you would expect from certain things or the vague world sound that you might expect from a very fictional universe yeah it's it's it's all about writing lots of gold to support what these guys want to do okay and last but certainly not least uh the man with the greatest hair at cig yeah i said it i said it brian it's bob rozzolo bob who are you what do you do
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for star citizen oh you got me competing against brian oh no that's bad um yeah my name is bob i'm the lead dialogue dude um and uh yeah i mean i i i make the words come alive uh no uh you know it's it's very similar to what what phil said there it's uh the narrative they have the creative vision and and uh you know we get the actors in and we take it from uh you know their performance and make it sound beautiful and get it in the game and you know especially with dialogue it's a huge amount of assets and a lot of you know especially these uh you know narrative driven games and uh it's it's a lot of basically organization in in uh managing a ton of amount of assets you make the words come alive and i kill them i just murdered their
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words all right so uh today we are talking about generalized audio stuff for the star citizen persistent universe we've got a designer we've got a programmer we've got a word dude uh so as usual we take questions live during the show if you're watching on twitch right now you can submit your question with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets it's going to help our community management team pull it out from chat and send it on to me we also put up a thread earlier this week on spectrum our bespoke communication platform on robertsspaceindustries.com and that let people submit their questions throughout the week and vote up the ones they wanted to see answered most so as we are usual to do we are going to start with that thread while the questions from live chat come in and one of the most voted up questions in the chat that shows up almost every time we do an
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audio show guys are we expecting to get something along the lines of red alert in the future or a bow station's audio to be controllable from the captain's chair something something to tell everybody else on the ship that that that that stuff's going down [Music] um i think they're they're referring definitely to the to the ship computer voice the ship computer kind of telling you this the the state's happening yeah um the shift control voice or just yeah red red red alert red alert yeah i think a lot of it has to do with uh uh you know getting the that situation to really uh occur and give the give us enough game uh data to make that happen and i think a lot of uh right now uh you know a ship's life is
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is rather binary uh you're alive or dead and there's a lot of plans in there to you know have you know a lot of components take damage and failure and leading to you to have an imminent you know death where you have an x amount of time to really have this drama um unfold and uh and in order for us to really uh uh gain on on that kind of you know that ship computer that that case uh we really need to have the that that drama to happen for us um but but also um you know especially for a ship-wide announcement like that we need the the bigger side of it is to have and we've talked about this before too is that that pa system within your ship uh uh so that you can hear um these shipwide announcements from anywhere in the ship
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and uh we're getting closer to that actually we we have that tech uh at its base uh core um working right now and uh we're using it uh in uh current features that coming out in the next release so um it is it is it is something that's that's happening um but to get it to the point of having it in all of our ships that's going to take uh a lot of backlog work and things like that so it plus the tech is also in its early early days so we we're we are getting there that that is a vision and i do like the idea of this this kind of question poses where it's the the captain can kind of trigger that that uh that use case as well just to kind of like battle stations i mean that that's how would you really determine that other than the captain saying that we think this is a battle stations uh scenario so i'm gonna trigger that uh as
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as the captain and i think that's that's a pretty cool idea i would like to make that i'd like to make that happen as a user myself i think that's pretty cool i'm going to add a pointer i'll go ahead graham i'll do mine yeah i was just going to say because uh you know everything we do is systemic so from a tech side you know we have a systemic point system where people communicate with each other we have um a tannoy system that although we haven't marked it up in all the ships it is proven to be working and we have a ship wide audio channel for the voip for communication so it's not a massive leak to then say let's stick a microphone on the captain's seat and then give you a button you can press and then you can talk to the panoy system you don't say it because everything's systemic there's not a great deal of work involved in doing that from a tech perspective there is a huge amount of markup required in terms of you know making
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sure that the uh the tunnel reaches every extent of the ship and things like that so um yeah it's definitely a it's a great idea i love the idea um and if you talk about having a player drive it your player sets the alert state and a player talks to the rest of the ship then yeah it doesn't sound like a huge amount of uh hugely from where we are right now in terms of tech but obviously you know we'd have a huge amount of design and work to uh to follow up and i do want to follow up uh when when bob said that some part of it's coming in the next patch he's not talking about the player implemented part it's not it's a part that we're using yeah that we're not going to tell you about yet discover it yourself so just before the summaries go out there and be like bob said it's coming next patch uh let's see what have we got next
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uh i don't remember which show isc or qa perhaps that this was mentioned but the devs talked about ray tracing being used for proper audio directions for example if someone walks to the other side of the wall you'll hear the sound come from the window or door instead of through the wall can you give us an update on this tech i certainly can because i'm currently working on it so um right now i'm working on some additions to the uh the room system in the game which are those editions are not specific to audio they're going to underpin how this audio propagation is going to work but they're going to be used by other systems too the ai teams interested in what i'm doing and you know other there are other systems that would definitely benefit from this
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thing um but i'm in the process of making it possible to efficiently traverse through our room system and by efficiently i mean i'm talking sort of thousands of queries per game frame so that we can you know uh we can make sure all the audio knows which path it should be taking then also we can help to inform the direction that ai should be taking to find a particular room and be honest so um it's it's got a long way to go um i'm not going to say anything about when it's going to finally make it into the game but i am actively working on it and it is my number one priority right now so um obviously your priority shift all the time but yeah this is very much in progress and i i personally i think this is this is one of the biggest things i want to see in the game from my own perspective so yeah i'm
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really pushing hard to get this working well i've seen that 1000 yard development stair in time zone says priority shift sometimes the game development but it is right now it's my number one priority uh yeah game development man the only constant is change uh let's see what's next let's look for the ch in the chat here uh are there any updates for updating surround sound into the game uh is there a timeline when we can see a standard such as dolby atmos be incorporated thanks uh this is from the nor the the director of north america marketing for dolby atmos yeah so spatialization is something we're currently exploring um so looking at enabling specialization
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in wise which will allow backers to make use of their dolby atmos you know dts and windows spatialization and stuff and the current version of wires that we're on doesn't permit that release yet but when we move migrate to the new version of wise then it's something we can continue to explore um but it's important to note that um when we enable that it's um the dolby atmos the dts and stuff that's third party um software um so although we can enable the feature it'll be down to the backers to choose you know which um which versions they want to go with um people might have just you know aesthetic preferences which spatialization tool they want to go with um but beyond that um we we still have a keen air on surround support now it's been a bit challenging with uh working from home
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um because we've all been working from home since uh march last year um and you know most of us are working in like um you know some have like spare bedrooms i'm currently in my dining room and stuff and we're doing our best to work in like build the acoustic environment have decent playback and stuff but the practicalities of it is we don't all have room for 5171 systems um so it is that that is a shame but it's something where we start a keen ear on um but also beyond that so we've got specialization we're looking into um keeping an ear on surround sound um but we're also having a focus on um like fake hrtf which is a head related transfer function uh a couple of our really talented sound
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designers like uh fran del pierre and adi kelch and they're really spearheading uh looking into um attenuating sound uh based on the uh the position of the emitter uh relative to the player um so what head related transfer function is basically is things sound differently depending where they are around you if they're in front of you behind you above you below you the ear attenuates the sound slightly differently and we're looking to in simplistic ways try and telegraph that to the player so when you're in a dog fight for instance you can kind of hear the sound changing and you can learn that hey that's above me that's below me because we're not just dealing with a flat plane like an fps where things are in front of you or behind you or
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slightly above a slightly below if you're in a 3d space you know in a dogfight in space then everything could be and all accesses at the same time um so yeah we understand it's massively important for a game such as star citizen and s42 um so it's definitely on our radar and we are looking into it um you've mentioned the conversion to the new uh wise i feel like we've been talking about that for a while how's that going well it's it's just more than once yeah it's literally a process right but graham going to talk a bit more about that yeah i mean we've upgraded probably since the last time we spoke we've upgraded the version of wires twice um because we have the quarter release window
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we have a window that kind of intersects with that for actually doing things like this where we want to make sure we've got enough testing time make sure there's been no sort of regression of issues in the middleware things like this so we always look for a big enough window for us to upgrade the wise version um so as not to risk the quality of the next release so yeah i think we did upgrade wise in both of the previous releases and we will be looking to upgrade it in the next one too um are there going to be npc ra is there going to be npc radio chat in the verse for example when we're getting near a station uh that our radio captures the chats of other embassy pilots you know folks nbc is calling for landing clearances stuff like that uh that we'll be able to overhear yeah
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yeah i mean uh i've i've had chats with uh dave about this a few times and i think this this might have even come come up in previous qas uh uh but the the idea is definitely that that we want um you know to have that uh you know kind of when you're like like a pilot has in in you know in in a typical aircraft they get other chatter on on an open channel um and that that concept is something that we really would like to have for star citizen as well i mean the main the main thing that really holds up something like that is just pure content i mean it's it to have conversations like that back and forth with many different actors and enough to make something a feature like that very interesting it takes a lot of a lot of recording time so it's something that's going to um
00:15:14
you know take a bit of time to get into but it is on our roadmap it is something that we really want to achieve uh uh you know especially for you know interactions with the atc and having people kind of overhear other people parking and things like that you know it's we want that kind of feeling of life uh going on around the the uh the lending zones and uh and that's that's really important to us the the la that life helmet is is really something that we're you know in in general is really something that we're we're putting a lot of focus on as of late so yeah one cool little thing i was speaking to um darren the audio director about is you know in the future um looking to like doing um going through jump gates and wormholes and that kind of travel is um it would be really cool if we could
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with permission record the like voip input of any player um and then play that back um whilst they're in these like altered states traveling through wormholes um as if it's like warping the reality of of time and space um there's many hoops to jump through before we even start exploring that but i think it'd be really cool to kind of hear back some comms like all um all processed reversed and stuff just to give that ethereal feeling as you they're very like interstellar kind of traveling through uh this medium that would be very cool i could feel my backlog growing as we speak sorry great yeah we'll talk we'll talk about backlog in a bit um that we ask the game to do
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requires some amount of resources you know it's whether it's audio visual you know effects gameplay it's we're always balancing resources this question from the live chat is basically is audio in the live build dependent at all on server performance or rather i guess we'll rephrase it does server performance affect the quality of audio that players are hearing in the game right now that is a very uh that i could probably take up the rest of this uh it's cool because i want to give so go ahead cool so i'll try to give you the shortest answer as possible um while jared gets a drink so the server performance doesn't directly
00:17:40
affect the audio performance on the client but what it does do is if the servers are running at lower frame rate then that affects how quickly game events happen and most of what we do as uh as audio tech is hanging off the end of a game then so if you do get a degradation in in server audio being sort of late is a potential knock-on that you can have from that but in terms of quality of audio and in terms of um you know whether you sort of hear anything like audio drop or not so things like that that should never happen that's the server doesn't have any influence over that sort of thing that's the shortest answer i could manage for all right we'll allow it uh what's the approach when you design the
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engine sounds of a ship of a particular manufacturer well i'll say that one then um so what we'll do is we'll we'll look at the the manufacturer uh and see what they're kind of the the brief is about those like are they aligned with military they're more aligned with alien tech you know uh are they cheaply made are they are they well made then we'll look at the the ship specifically is it a fighter you know a hauler is it meant to be focused on mining anything particular to um then we'll have like a creative kickoff and pulling references from other ships um that we have and see where there's any parity and stuff and then we'll kind of generate a style guide um and then start generating source um look at references and then start to um
00:19:23
to implement them and then tune them in games so we'll get them in wise um because we a lot of the the the sound effects only really come together at runtime in the ship so when you're flying a ship it's kind of like you're playing um like a musical instrument in a way because we'll implement all these different layers and one shots but it's actually the ship the ship's movement and input that actually triggers all these um and we have different rtpcs that will attenuate sounds in in pitch and volume high pass low pass and effect um based on the um the action the input from the ship so yeah so as a high level we go this manufacturer typically does military ships so everything sounds really robust and um say aggressive and this ship is like a fighter so
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everything needs to be sleek and fast and not too bulky um and then start um tailoring the sounds to that and that doesn't just specifically mean pertain to thrusters that could be anything like moving parts ambiences you know any kind of component work and stuff like that um so yeah we want to try and establish like a brand identity for each manufacturer and then with each category of ship make sure it sounds appropriate so you've not got a fighter that sounds like you know a giant whale of a cargo ship and vice versa all right uh bob i think this one's right up your alley here has there been any consideration of adding background conversations doesn't need to be understandable to help increase the realism of crowds of ai right now when you go to a space
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populated with multiple ai like a spaceport at new babbage or exposition halls during shows there is no sound from the ai characters talking to each other and it seems unrealistic talk to us about walla yeah well yeah the the indiscernible uh dialogue that that connect question really alludes to is is wallah but you know in general uh light liveliness kind of comes from having having lots of layers you have a background and a foreground and in the middle middle ground and or even more than just those you know three layers for for dialogue and it's a little bit more complicated than you kind of might think you know in general the walla as it would sit you know is is a very static bed of looping bed and um you know and
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it doesn't really do much to help sell when when the you know population of a room changes if it grows or decreases or you know if the mood changes or if the player has an impact on the mood you know and and pulls out a gun and a crowd and starts firing out you know don't don't don't do that but uh you know if if that were to happen you know you you know the crowd would change you know and and you would you would want that to kind of to hear that so it's you know it's it's quite a more um impactful system and um you know we actually have a real goal to to to really achieve this and we want to do a dynamic walla system that that actually really accounts for players coming and going the size of the population what you know the the even even kind of the economic status of what the population would be or their mood and
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how things change like that and that's that's that's something that's really heavy on our radar but that's even just just a walla you know that's just just the background you know we we want to um you know we have the foreground which i think they're also kind of alluding to in this conversation too of actually seeing players having a conversation and a lot of that is is you know very dependent on on behavior and ai behavior and and again alluding to back to what i said before about you know conversation trees and like that chatter that that's a lot of content you know with a lot of actors and uh but mainly especially that it depends on on behavior and and and you know acknowledging you know those two characters acknowledging that they're in a shared conversation that one person said this topic and now i need to comment on something that makes sense from that topic and then
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and then they want to rebuttal after that and you want to have like some kind of at least a three-way you know back and forth of a conversation and that that takes a lot of a lot of effort and it's it's a lot more complex than you might think and then that again is just the foreground and so yeah then you have the background needing this system at the foreground needing its system and then you know well what do you do you know about kind of gluing those two together and this is something that we've been really trying to achieve more recently because you know it's it's it's like a kind of a filmic kind of thing where you're you're trying to showcase sound unseen um and so it's not we don't really want to allude that there are people actually talking right there with you or uh or whatnot but we want we want to hear that there's conversations coming about about you that's not part of that static bed
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and so we we kind of have this uh um you know it doesn't it doesn't call out to you but it doesn't it doesn't kind of wash away it's it's just kind of it has like a pepper and some spice to what other would be an otherwise static kind of bland uh bed and and that's what you you've seen it in the cargo uh in refinery decks you're gonna see it in our new location for or orizon uh we're we're trying to achieve a bit more of that and and that's it's going to kind of help uh glue some of the stuff together while we still really need to put a lot of effort into these systems that are a bit more complicated than you might think so uh but it's it's it's definitely heavy on our our our minds right now because that's that's that's like a big thing for us is feeling that life in it in a space even if we don't have
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the uh the tech or ability yet to do that we want to try to achieve it in uh any way that we can and even in the interim so we're doing we're doing our best yeah just to add you know on the end of that the reason these things take time is because we try to do everything systemically we try to uh try to solve the problem for the whole picture rather than solving specific cases by adding beds that suit this particular area and that would mean that when uh you know when the tech's not ready yet certain areas like you mentioned in the question it can feel a little bit like they're lacking some life and some color but what we're looking to do to solve that is not to just artificially throw that life and color in but throw in a system that allows us to color whatever space it might be so it's not just about wallets not just it's not just even about
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characters it might be that you know you can walk into a room full of hospital beds and and we could have a system that allows us to recognize that there's a lot of hospital beds in this room and gives it that kind of calm audio background that a hospital room has because it's found all these objects and you know this kind of idea so we're looking to make a system that basically allows us to to color every part of the universe we've got to work at scale and you know one of our buzzwords is bespoke but a lot of times we try to avoid a bespoke solution you don't want one solution for the hospital one solution for the convention hall and one solution for the space stations like that you need something that can hit everything all at once so that we can just so when we keep adding these new locations these new star systems these are things that we don't have to keep doing the same work over
00:26:33
and over again it's just tweaking variables and again looking at that big picture of of content it's it's like we we we try to get a little bit out of time you know you know we're getting this content that's going to take a long time to get we are getting it a little bit at a time and it's it's it just takes takes a lot of time for that for for for getting those kind of big dialogue trees going it's hard we're we can be as impatient as anybody sometimes we want it we want it just as much as anybody else have you started exploring the sounds for creatures like the space whale yet uh so that's me um we we've got early concepts that we're looking at but we've not really um dug into it yet
00:27:22
i think the the first one is going to be the the space whale fitting around um arizona right um so that's gonna be really interesting because it will be a big collaboration between sound design and dialogue design and code because like we need this to make a sound can you build his implementation so we can hook into it and then speaking with barton's like what is our baseline for creature sounds like how big are they going to be like what are they going to sound like um and then to start building some mock-ups and then refining it um so yeah early early days uh but nothing nothing concrete yet it's also important to acknowledge that the behaviors of what these creatures can do because then you have you have a mixture of the different kind of you know or can they eat are they can they attack you can they yeah are they going to be you know sleeping or or quiet you know
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it's it's it's really it's about you know capturing the that essence in their their emotion the different things that they can do um i'm not sure what what what the ors and whales can do other than looking really pretty uh i mean i'm sure they'll i don't have no i don't know but uh but uh the the you know as we expand especially expand on on the fauna um that is that is kind of the the biggest thing is looking at all the different things they can do and kind of making them really feel like a real living creature there's a good it's a really good point about the behavior because you know you almost have to establish a language right like is it sound angry can it sound sad can it sound happy can it sound aggressive you know are there any gameplay cues that we need to support like it's about to attack you you know what's come after you or gameplay or you know
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if if it's like a hunting mechanic not saying there is one but um what how do you respond to that with sound you know we really need to get understand what the uh the whole gameplay loop requirement is of said fauna uh as a follow-up question uh can you uh demonstrate for us one of those early concepts you were looking at phil yeah i think uh i think graham's been warming up his vocals for this haven't you graham which one do you want you want space whale or pirate crab uh space whale that's what i've got so far it's the business obviously if you put a huge amount of reverb on that you know it's gonna sound like uh like me uh making that noise but i think i i think that i think that's shippable
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i'll uh i'll get that rendered and then i don't think i didn't hit record oh it's the case and uh since you offered oh space grubs uh not i can't do that with my vocal chords the way they are after the space whale i tried uh all right here's an old chestnut this comes up every single time we do one of these shows is a more rigorous simulation of sound on the table doppler effect sonic booms sound actually traveling across distances are being delayed no sound in space what do you got for us sonic boom honestly if you guys just put the sonic boom in you could just coast the rest of this game [Laughter]
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it comes up it does and it's tricky we understand why people why people want it so what we've we've made an active decision to um to not go along with the the speed of sound in the game um that's primarily because as soon as something happens in the game you want audio feed back there for gameplay reasons um so as soon as something happens you want to hear it um and what what sonic boom is um is if you've got an observer of an aircraft moving uh faster or at the speed of sound the sound builds up at the front of the aircraft so it's basically a wall of sound that persists and now as your the observer and the aircraft passes by you you perceive that as like a transient boom but it's just a wall of sound passing
00:31:22
your singular location and stuff um so what we do with ships specifically is we have like um npc proxy passed by loops um which is a kind of in atmosphere specifically is the kind of rippage you normally associate like jet engines and whatnot and then we have um bespoke flyby sounds that are are triggered uh when you know certain conditions are met the the ship is moving at a certain speed uh it'll vary which um uh fly by it sound it plays uh and then how close it is to the player now to scratch that edge for sonic booms we we currently have quite heavily designed flyby sound effects that are quite sci-fi now for in atmospheric flight what we could could do is uh look to introduce more kind of a typical sonic boom
00:32:10
um elements uh in these pass-bys so there'd be a bigger delineation between a pass by in space uh versus a pass by um in an atmosphere um just to give that kind of that feel of boom but we don't typically on a the speed of sound um because that would be massively expensive to calculate one um but that's not saying it's completely off the table um because we might we might uh play a bit creatively you know if if there are a certain context where you know um you want that that delay between visual and sonics just for an impact say in the cut scene or something you know um so we are aware of the mechanic um it's just um it's something we try and move away from uh gameplay-wise
00:33:00
um but i don't know uh graham like how blue skying like how expensive do you think it would be to uh to create a system that would accurately map speed of sound over distance in varied pressurized environments because the medium would determine the speed of sound sound moves faster in water the denser the medium that doesn't air and then you have to given the the different atmospheric pressures of the different planets and the the the how thick the atmosphere is at different altitudes it'd be and then send it out to 100 different clients yeah yeah various points on the planet yeah i mean it would be quite a large undertaking there would be two possible approaches one would be to delay the
00:33:48
audio itself so adding a delay step to the playback of the audio which would it would be expensive a little bit in terms of cpu maybe not so much but it would use a heck of a lot of memory because you have to be storing up all your audio and waiting to play it when the time comes you should have to that you should play it then that will be applied across all sounds so that would be prohibitive um the other option would be to effectively delay any events that affect i've been asked during meeting let me just decline this is the problem with us being at home and doing everything on my pc it's just it's just the kick off that i've just invited you to for the uh um fleshing out the uh the speed of sound um you know oh thanks thanks appreciate uh yeah so the other approach would be
00:34:36
effectively to delay all the events that affect the audio super weapon fires you'd kind of store the fact that it had fired and then at the point where you well you know the delay times you would then fire it but again you've got the same problem having to cue up all these actions that happened and then play them back after time and it's it it would just be a hugely sort of complex undertaking and but i think really that's not why we don't do because we would be able to do we would find a solution that's what we do i think the big problem goes back to what phil mentioned earlier in this course which is that um for gameplay reasons it doesn't make sense if you if somebody's firing at you you want to know you want if audio's the thing tells you that somebody's firing a weapon at you you want to know straight away and you want to know you've got time to spin
00:35:24
around and see who it is and if you have real speed of sound delay you can be dead before you hear the shot and you know that doesn't make for a fun game it might for some people you know some people might you know be big fans of some sniper games and things like this but um but this you know our game does a lot of things and to focus on that style of gameplay i think would probably be wrong everybody else in the company working to make things more performative and more faster on the audio team here trying to slow everything down yeah um gosh it has to be a carrot question uh might there be a system that lets me play music for my crew on the carrick just the carrick specifically not all ships uh during the long hours in space
00:36:14
it's a good question i mean we i think we've we've skipped over the jukebox question and and if you don't mind jared i'd like to sort of no it's the same thing as the old subscriber jukebox hit it yeah so um yeah so we have that we're aware that the jukebox is broken i think what we certainly what i wasn't quite so aware of is how popular the idea of resurrecting it is because it was quite the list of questions um that same tech could certainly be used for playback of music in any ship uh we would have to uh no just suggest the idea to design just the character okay just the character okay yeah that that'd be easier um yeah i mean you know it's a flare item and um you know the jukeboxes and anyone who knows me doesn't a big
00:37:02
fan of flares so we'd be able you know we we should be able to get that working without too much trouble it's been sort of pushed down the schedules due to priority um for quite some time but i think it does seem that people want it so you know we'll review that certainly next time we come to look at the schedules and um i think in terms of you know adding maybe a little music player that uses the same tech and can be placed in the ship that's not you know that's not a huge thing to ask for uh because the tech would be the same but obviously we would have to talk to people like designers and thing you would have to get it and you only have to do it for one ship so just do it for the character but with that you know we have to be um careful because if we enable people to stream effectively
00:37:51
stream music to um other gamers then that's not what this is like let's be clear yes it's actually playing music playing only only you're like only for you you wouldn't be able to stream your any music to anyone else because then you infringe on copyright and licenses and stuff now that was actually the specific wording let me play music for my crew so they are talking about the streaming of music too that's a good point um okay let's rewind everything i said and i'll just say no yeah don't blame us blame the riaa all right uh let's see what challenges are there in working on pyro's audio compared to that of stanton um i can take it from like a sound
00:38:39
design aesthetic point of view um so pyro's palette is massively different like visually to to stanton um so it's it it's a lot more turbulent um and with that going to come unique challenges the planet's going to be different the moon's going to be different have a completely different vibe so if you've got a stanton palette and you've got a pyro palette that they're they're in in themselves their own beasts and then you establish like what does stanson feel like what does it embody what do you want to sound like and then same with pyro um and then filter that down similar to the the ship thing right you build like a style guide of what you want pyro to sound like to sound dangerous and foreboding and then how do we filter that down and realize on this particular planet or this particular planet and then taking some
00:39:26
some specifics from each of those um it's going to be you know it's it's a load of fun um there's quite a lot to work with and we've learned a lot working on stanton um so the pyro stuff is uh it's really nice to get our teeth into but yeah it's new it's new uncharted territory with the the tekken tools have improved uh and and grown in scope since you know i started on the project and working on stanton um i think the um so the the actual ability to put sounds in um and tailor them to the experience is much improved we have a great deal of fidelity but i think the main challenge is really having that feel a shift between stanton and pyro so when you're in when you're in pyro anywhere in pyro space traversal or actually on
00:40:15
you know you feel like you're in that system versus stanton um so hopefully we can achieve that i wanted to add too that uh there's a discipline here that's kind of missing some representation uh music well i think will have a really big impact on selling the emotional aspect of where we're being from either stanton or pyro uh and that's a very i think a very critical element when when when feeling out a different space so uh in in a lot of cases meant to not be very obvious either uh um the way music affects you in that kind of sense so oh yeah sure yeah have you heard anything from pedro on pyro yet uh no no we're not we're not engaging music on pyro yex we've got other priorities
00:41:01
shifting priorities you know jared um but um that will that would be a big undertaking because we've all it's all stanton's been all-consuming right uh for the project and pyro is a huge shift um working on a completely new system um and it's gonna be a lot of fun working with pedro uh fleshing out the music for that i was gonna say he usually sends me the early stuff first you know you get my opinion i'm like he hasn't sent me anything yet so i was gonna be i was gonna be disappointed if you guys had heard things and i hadn't yet um will the wilheim scream appear in star citizen or squadron 42. maybe it's already in there oh no it's not absolute absolutely not no no it's a trope and stuff um but
00:41:51
essentially it's um it's a joke of the sound designer from star wars ben bert was putting it in and then it was an in-joke of him putting in a lot of films um and it being just recognized by recognizable um but it's it's you know a lot of people do it um but if you're aware of it you'll be in watching the film or playing the game and stuff and as soon as you hear it you you're just taken out of the uh the of the experience immersion's kind of broken because you hear this sound effect that's been of dialogue asset that's been in uh in so many other other things um so i i i don't think it would find a place in either the projects uh but it dialogue you know it's it's bob's domain maybe maybe he really wants it and we can do
00:42:38
it yeah we're waiting for you gotta give him hope we're waiting for the hucklebee screen to be delivered that we can use fan stuff for a second i'd consider doing it and i'm not going to do it pause there like um being a gas giant and as such unlike any other planetary body in the pu is crusader getting particularly different sounds like such as there being no ground sand foliage and so on yeah so uh looking at crusader and orizon the the landing location like sky city uh obviously we've been sinking with art really really closely
00:43:26
and uh wind is going to be a big hero character of that location um so yeah we have wind and weather and stuff in other locations but we'll be spending uh particular uh attention on crafting the wind and the ambience of that location to make it sound good uh wind is essentially just shaped broadband noise so it's going to be slightly challenging um but there obviously there's the actual landing location itself to tie into and that's going to have a lot of opportunities to have um nice audio tidbits um but regardless of crusade of the the planet with it being a gas giant i think one thing we can really uh play with is the idea of of pressure now we don't want to we don't want audio to be driving
00:44:12
uh gameplay decisions and features and stuff but what i'd like to explore is the idea of of pressure on the ship and the then the audio feedback you would get uh regards to atmospheric pressure um because you'll never be able to get to there's no surface to get to but the further down you go the more um pressure you'll be um taking on the whole of your ship think like uh submarine underwater and how they can creak and grow and all that kind of stuff so um i think it'll provide some opportunities for how the environment of crusader can affect the the likes of the uh the ship and whatnot i'm hoping we'll see some contrast to the inside and outside too right phil i mean you have to think about the outside
00:45:00
being so windy but then the inside being nice and calm and serene you get a bit more sharper contrast between the indoor outfits yeah get that juxtaposition from you know being inside being sheltered and then being out on the you have open gantries and stuff um yeah and you know with horizon specifically it's making sure that the different districts the different areas have their own kind of uh feel as well they're all in the same environment i'm being up up in the in the sky but it's making sure that each one has a different feel and maybe you know they each one deals with the wind slightly differently you know if there's a more business functional area then it's making sure that you know everything just sounds functional they're not trying to make the the external traversal pleasing whereas like the communal area where the shops are and stuff like that
00:45:48
um making sure that it's uh they're protecting their uh the uh the people on foot uh got a follow-up question to our uh space crab and space whale question here uh how how will you create the sounds of the creatures in the verse will you just modify the sound of earth animals or do you create them from zero yeah um bob do you want to talk about some dialogue design stuff where i can i can approach it from some sound effects stuff i mean i mean the idea behind it in in general though is is finding like sounds um and and you know you can take a real earth animal um or even uh uh you know use your
00:46:37
uh a human voice to cr to create a a base of something and then um having like sounds and processes and working with that to create something new um is is kind of the the key there uh i mean you know but you don't have to start with a real animal source to get a real feeling of of a being it's just about it's a matter of how that sound interacts or how you can play with that sound to make it sound like a living being so and then that and that's what's really special about sound designer creatures is creature design in general it's so it can really come from any kind of source um and and what not but it's just about you know what what's what's the palette that you're looking or what's the sound or what
00:47:22
you know what what's their function you know um that really kind of uh sets you up with you know what's what's your source really okay yeah you can do a lot so um one technique that's used is um you know dinosaurs kind of birds and stuff you slow them right down so if you if you record at a high enough sample rate so say you record at 192 uh kilohertz you can really slow that down and you don't lose uh fidelity of the information um so you can take like a tweet tweet from a bird and pitch it right down to make it sound like a behemoth kind of uh like stegosaurus or something um but um what we um what what's on the market now is um certain microphones can record frequencies way above
00:48:10
what the the human ear can perceive so we can hear up to about uh well 20 000 hertz and but there are microphones that can record like up to 90 000 100 000 so it's it's it's audio content that we can't even perceive now if you record it 192 um and then above the 20k range so you're recording at say 100k and then you pitch all that stuff down you're moving stuff down that is unperceivable to the human ear into the audible range and it's also a high fidelity because the sample rate so you could take a bird recording a wall or wrestle horse and you could pitch it down you hear all this hidden content that is just is out there in the world but you just can't perceive it so you can draw upon that for sure and then uh the other thing we we can do
00:48:59
for like creature design is use plugins that can morph sounds together um so you can get the the sound of one thing uh and take that its impulse its dynamics its frequency content and uh have that morph with a completely unrelated sound you can get like a dolphin and a chainsaw so you can make a chainsaw that has all the articulation of a dolphin core or vice versa so that's a good uh technique to employ um or just like as bob said like making the kind of like vowel sounds like sounds of like the vocal tract there's loads of formant filters um out there that you can make things sound like you know that that really grounds sounds in um in some kind of creature because it's all relatable right all these
00:49:48
valve formats that we all make uh and that's a a trick that we do for wind if you want wind uh to sound creepy or ominous you'd put it put an element through a formant filter so as you walk past the door it's like you go that's creepy uh and then not going in there no thank you but yeah so there's loads of techniques we can do and it's going to be it's know creature design's really fun um and you'll come up with some absolutely ridiculous results and that's part of the fun um so yeah looking forward to that if there's not a ship in the verse named dolphin chainsaw within the next 10 minutes i'm going to be disappointed also epic bird i might grab that somebody usually i'm against this but somebody got a reddit and create a
00:50:36
thread that says that phil confirmed dolphin chainsaw for star citizen today absolutely just so i can get the email from chris it's the parasite docking uh creature for the space whale that's what it is uh any audio easter eggs you can tell us about uh yeah unfortunately we're a little light on that um i i'd love to put more in on real work yeah you know so with the shifting priorities jared it's quite hard sometimes too no basically we're focusing on getting work for releases done uh focus on getting uh squadron work done and stuff uh there was an easter egg in eight years ago uh there was the gray cat buggy that you could drive around the hangers and stuff
00:51:24
like you know uh and uh as a laugh we replaced the the horn with like a fog horn uh so rather than the beep beep it was like oh um well that was that was that was years ago now um but yeah no i'm all up for easter eggs uh so you know uh when we start getting around to like polishing things you know um and finalizing things out that uh yeah i'll be within reason and not put not doing anything i'm not meant to be i'll happily put some stuff in there okay graham voip yes that's it that's just the question voip okay i have the question in front of me voip is less than perfectly reliable in
00:52:13
my experience for party chat and even in my own home the three star citizen players use discord instead when can we expect a bit of love for this important subsystem i'd like to discover that can other people hear me and am i not hearing other people quickly and easily for now at least so the good news is that when you can expect a bit of love for this important subsystem is in the quarter that just ended because we've been working on it all the way through since the beginning of the year uh trying to improve all the stability that get rid of all the connection issues that we've had and all that is now um going to be in the next release all that work is already submitted um obviously we have to wait until that build goes out to know just how much
00:53:01
we've achieved but uh i am very confident that you're gonna find that the voip stability is way better than it ever was and we are aiming you know if we find any more issues we'll be jumping straight on because we are we are aiming for this to be 100 reliable we want people using this feature we've put a lot of work into it and it's so important for us that people use that uh system that we put so much work into um so yeah we've got a lot of work on it and we would love to hear your feedback send your letters to graham phillipson care of clouderprem games uk wimslow right i don't actually understand how uk addresses work i was gonna make it hydrocephalus your addresses are so different than the us addresses i'm just uh at least we've got our dates the right way around though
00:53:48
i i actually do prefer the european way of writing dates so you mean the correct way yeah i also like metric systems ago no no to me the only correct way is year month day because that's true since i worked worked on dialogue with you bob like all of my files all of my archives they they do the year first then the month then the day is that not what we're talking about i do year month date is that not what we're talking about oh well you know because obviously we have studios here in the uk we have studios in the us and stuff but sometimes you get a date which is the the day and the month are interchangeable i think the what i've seen from the us they put the month first then the day then the year and over here it's it's it's always day month year are you doing i've got first two digits
00:54:35
of the year then the day all four digits of the year then two digits of the month two digits of the day that's the way to do it when you're dabbing you're working that's really useful but you know if you write the date like that in the the general societal world you might confuse people that's why i'm still single um all right i bet chat loved that diversion uh cyberpunk introduced completely new bands to fit in this kind of genre like samurai i already know that there's a metal band called clover in star citizen will we ever hear official tracks from the the fictional bands in star citizen in the persistent universe um so with this um i think
00:55:27
it would come down to syncing with uh narrative uh and with bob uh because the if they're writing lyrics uh presuming i have to be in law right and appropriate um but what what is challenging on the music side cause we you know we have composers um we have pedro on the the pu and we have jeff on s42 and we do compose some music internally um it's really trying to establish what um music would sound like in law in the verse um that far in the future like if you put some ac dc kind of rock in the game it would be out of place so um if we do um start to flesh out more like in like diegetic
00:56:16
music which is a music from in the world um it's always going to have this sci-fi take on it uh and make sure it sits well uh in the setting um but yeah i'll defer to bob about how you'd engage with narrative and kind of uh kick off that process yeah it's i mean yeah because i i know that i know of of a little bit that we've done but that's for squadron so i can't talk about that um but uh but we it that i'm yeah i it's it's it's a great it's a great idea it's a great concept and it's something that i know narrative are very interested in because they already have have named these names of these bands and i mean they they they put them in there so that we can have things to talk about in
00:57:03
these conversations that we that we that i've alluded to earlier these trees we want to have things to talk about about the the universe and thing and a lot of times they talk about music or like their favorite this or that or whatever like you know food places to go or brands or things like that so that we're we're building all of this in our universe and it and music makes sense to have as well and so you know uh but yeah phil phil is definitely right if you know it's it's going to be you know i mean it's not just about naming them and and referencing them but tying them to to real assets and having them have a real sound and and kind of this this persistence kind of feeling of that of the these these bands and or just these entities in general um in in the universe and so it's very much on on narrative to
00:57:51
kind of uh for them to push that for us but we we will we will we will definitely build a relationship to i think that i think having more music i identified like that is is pretty cool so i like to push it if you're challenging the narrative team to start coming up with bands that you know you just created yourself a whole bunch of work they would absolutely do it okay um all right we have got two minutes left so let's do let's do a lightning round quick answers for these ones the quickest answers you can so we can get squeeze squeeze some more questions in uh i remember a time ago it was said that debris debris of an exploding ship could be heard when they hit our cl when they hit our hull uh anything anything you have to tell us yeah so on the back of an explosion uh there are several different variants of debris
00:58:38
triggered if you're in close proximity to the explosion and vfx are working on more physicalized particles hitting your ship so we'll be putting sounds to those cool uh the sound of quantum travel when a ship is arriving at your location sounds odd and unrealistic uh any plans to uh change or improve that soon uh yeah so qt stuff is kind of a slightly legacy uh and it the qt mechanic has increased in scope since our first pass of it um so we do try and tackle these things in tech depth so it's on our radar uh it's something we'll uh look to do what's the tank sound like epic punk tongue uh let's see um voice commands for communicating with the ship
00:59:27
like our own version of of uh voice voice attack or whatever yeah i mean yeah that's very good sorry bob that's in the backlog it's in the backlog and consistently two years out from being started work on geez yeah i mean i i will say that it is a i mean as a player myself that is like one of my biggest dreams to be able to walk around and speak into like the voip speaking to the mic and have an npc acknowledge me and actually have them ask me a question maybe yes no question even simply and i say yes and then he acknowledges that and like how flipping cool would that be i mean that's that's that's all of our dreams at least i mean for i think not on the audio team um everyone i've talked to we all feel the same way about it it's it but that it's a huge thing so yeah uh any updates on
01:00:17
text to speech system um yeah i mean that's that's that's moving along uh we we uh we're setting up some research uh in this quarter uh even to to kind of push forward on it um but uh you know roadmap priorities but it is it is definitely something that we we see as a really important um feature for us to to to get in so it's yeah it's coming okay and uh uh lastly uh what does the hercules sound like epic no that sounds that sounds great uh we've we've actually spent a long time um going through not only the the thrusters and all the
01:01:06
cool stuff but uh the interior ambiences because it's a huge ship and there's so so much interdependence what the ship is doing and the audio feedback you get from like components words and wines and ambiances and stuff like that so it's going to sound really fitting for the size of it and it's it it's one of the largest largest ships we worked on for a little while um so we hope that you're going to be happy with it cool that's it that's our show everybody thank you so much for being here on the show with us this week we are going to throw the uh we're going to throw the uh what is it called it's called a raid 2. who are we rating tyler meyer all right we're rating meyer he's got a nice hat now meyer's cool meyer is a long-time volunteer
01:01:54
anytime we got events in the in the eu uh meyer is always there helping out uh so throw the raid over to meyer say hi uh ask him where he got his hat uh for star citizen live uh i'm jared that's bob that's phil that's graham uh we'll see you next week everybody take care bye bye bobson exactly last time and dropped the call immediately i want a hat where's my hat yeah where's my hat send us a hat

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