Star Citizen: Around the Verse - The Sounds of Science

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm sandy Gardner and I'm Chris Robbins in today's episode we'll be taking a look and maybe more importantly a listen at some of the ways that we use audio in star citizen yes it's always good to listen but first let's go to LA studio director eric kieron davis for a quick star citizen project update and see what the devs have been up to recently in the pu thanks guys if you're following along at home on the roadmap we're going to kick things off with characters the character customizer being introduced in alpha 3.1 is being polished by several teams working to fine-tune this highly anticipated feature the gameplay feature team is tweaking the options for eye and skin color as well as the way they're presented within the customizer we want

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   to make sure the interface is intuitive and responsive as possible and the UI team continues to make adjustments to the customizer to ensure that the character customizer is one of the most exciting new features coming online without 43.1 as it will allow citizens to begin their journey creating an avatar that can fully represent them within the star citizen universe on the roadmap we see that all tasks for this feature are completed and have entered the polishing phase where feature teams work with QA to hammer out as many bugs as they can before bringing the first iteration of this character customizer to life joining the character customizer in polishing our helmet improvements including updates to the model geometry efforts to make sure certain characters are well lit with that within the helmets and fixed bugs like the light

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   persisting even when the helmets are not being worn additionally our character teams are working on a few other projects that you don't see on the roadmap but are integral to features and content planned for future releases you can also see here the work being done on character models for male and female senators as well as finishing touches being put on the legacy outlaw and legacy marine armor models when we say legacy armor we mean older armors within the star citizen universe we want you to feel this is a galaxy with history and these legacy armors are one of the way we are aiming to achieve just that now moving on to locations many resources are being put into the overall improvement of our procedural planet tech improvements to these visuals of

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   our first three moons yella de mark and sullen include color balancing object distribution new diffuse height and global maps have all been completed and outstanding tasks remaining include detailed polish improved procedural distribution for planetside features and some dynamic weather effects that Marco Cabrera has been working on the environment art team has also been working on Delamar focusing on the visual transition between close medium and far viewpoints and the scattering of assets while also addressing some unwanted pink hues space views of yella have been much improved and on the R&D front the team continues to work on something called speed tree which you'll learn about more in the coming months additionally as you may have heard already on calling all devs a revamp of the player hangars is underway they are

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   currently in grey box as work continues on making them properly modular so they'll function in a variety of star citizen environments it's still too early to say when these new player hangars might make their way into the persistent universe but keep an eye on the RSI roadmap for an edition in the future continuing to look ahead the environment art and tech teams work to prototype the planet Hurston and its moons for lore Ville the teams are discussing the best way to approach it utilizing the procedural planet object presets well one of Hurston's moons Ariel has begun the process of white box block out for this particular moon we're looking at some very unique geography and you can see that the team has made a lot of meticulous progress building up the biomes for some early work on the planet Hurston check out our citizencon

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   2947 presentation available now on youtube from locations we're heading over to gameplay where feature teams have been working on bringing service beacon distress call system to life which will ultimately allow players to contact each other in-game to request assistance or services QT markers will show up when a player accepts a beacon following the same system currently used for in-game missions as with many of the other new features that come online with every star citizen release this initial iteration is an important step to player generated missions and content and we're excited to see how each of and every one of you will be using it so far the notification range will be tunable you'll have the ability to untracked or cancel a beacon once you've accepted it and the pop-up notification system will continue to be iterated on in future

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   releases for star citizen teams are also adding additional polish to the personal management app in your mobile s this includes work on the star marine loadout customizer for example whenever you whatever you've earned in the pu we'll carry you over to star marine now some items may not be available for certain game modes and the team is working on specific UI elements that will help you know what it is and what isn't available in ship news the vehicle team continues to make finishing touches to the ships and vehicles going live with 3.1 which you saw last week in our updated ship shape and in the world of weapons and items we have some exciting ship and FPS weapons from Gallants n' aman and reese preacher and more entering their polishing stages concept art is finalizing the design of the joker

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   distortion cannon blocking out the bearing pistol and working on several other guns for fps and what you see here is some of the work the effects has done this week on improvements to rail gun impact and distortion scattered gun effects finally this week in core tech we have closed out 45 of the 46 tasks needed to meet our performance optimization goal for alpha 3.1 this is of course a process that will be ongoing throughout development but having put a lot of focus on improving frame rate this quarter you should be able to easily see what the teams have accomplished for this upcoming release well that's it for the star citizen project update this week back to you Chris and sandy thanks Eric yes thank you very much Eric and without the 3.1 just released to a wider testing group in the PTU

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   and a live release a week away our dev teams and designers are looking ahead to alpha 3.2 features and content as part of this we evaluate where we are set priorities and make adjustments while also looking at quality of life issues in the current gameplay we thought it would be useful to get your input on what potential aspects are important to you as far as this goes so look for a community poll tomorrow to help us with our robot speaking of the roadmap as you saw in Eric's update not everything we work on for the games makes it onto the roadmap one aspect that you don't see for instance is audio yes audio is one of those things where if it's done right you almost don't notice it at all but it's hugely integral to conveying the stories experiences and immersion that drive the game let's go to Lee bannard and some of our other audio team members to find out more about the design and

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    implementation of star sirs and sounds in this week's feature hi I'm Lee ban yard audio director here at CI G today we're doing an audio special about how audio contributes to the immersion gameplay emotion of the whole game and we'll go through it piece by piece with going through all the different people who contribute to the experience in various ways the first piece we will be looking at will be a ship audio and how it you know in a way the ship audio it in our game it only really only comes all comes together once you actually experience some in-game itself so it's almost like the game is it's akin to an orchestra really it's like each each part of the ship audio for us two elements it's very difficult to say you know just take them in isolation the

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    pre-shape them they all work together and the game is almost doing the job of you know as you pilot your ship it's playing them and articulating them in a way you can't experience anywhere else and so much of our sound design list is effectively done with the game the game actually kind of sound designs in real time and where we're just as kind of mercy of that as well and so the process of sound design for the ship audio particularly it's a an ongoing iterative process as they change up story and then balance with light stuff we have to kind of change the audio to meet and reflect that it's it's yeah it's a complex process which is immensely rewarding hi I'm Darren and in this video I'd like to show you how the

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    Terrapin thruster design is composed of many different layers that will respond differently and dynamically to the pilot infinity this is a rather subtle layer that sits in the background and plays counterpoint to some of the more energetic layers so while those bigger more robust layers will kind of rise in pitch and volume when the ship is exerting itself this one kind of falls in pitch and sounds a bit sort of thinner and less energetic this rotation layer more specifically picks out the pitch roll in your inputs

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    this one's a bit more general it's tied to the numbers coming from the amount of thrust that's happening so this is kind of describing what the thrusters are doing mainly [Music] then we have our Serge layer which is more momentary it picks out larger thrust events so lots of acceleration or lots of deceleration tend to push this layer up here's the strafe layer now for when we're doing translational maneuvers and that works obviously in concert with

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    the rotation layer it also emphasizes the deceleration maneuver as well this induction layer describes the energy of the thrusters exciting resonant properties of the space frame and this as a general concept is something we're looking to expand in star citizen much much more in the future and beyond spaceships as well so here it all is in concert have Nikken pick out all of those component parts that we've heard in isolation thanks for what

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    part the fun a cracking sound for a space Sims your training sounds for environments that don't really exist you know it gives you a lot of creative artistic leeway always just you know no parallel in the real world at all and you know as I mean there's a lot of emphasis on the sound you know it's a lot of responsibility in creating a kind of narrative a mood and experience that you know brings stuff up open above what it would be in real life so yeah ambient sound plays a huge role and here's francesco and josh to talk about that hi i'm francesco and they recently designed some of the ambiences for the derelict ships with audio we have the ability to give the player pieces of information that would otherwise be difficult to convey solely through visuals one of my

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    goals with the derelict was to make the players feel uneasy and unsettled when they explored them by making them hear and feel what they can't see for example with sound you can imply what is happening behind the wall or instead of a pipe or even on a different floor I wanted the player to feel as if the derelict reacted to their presence as they walk around it in the following video you'll see how I managed to create the ambience for the Starfarer derelict on damar I wanted to convey the lack of energy of the place through its sound so some of the rooms in the ship are very quiet almost silent but if you stand still and listen to what is happening in the environment around you you will hear quite a few sonic details coming from

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    specific parts of the derelict structure I will now solo the ambiences and boost their volume while I walk close to the walls try to focus on each individual component of the environment and to listen to its parts creaking rattling groaning buzzing and so on the further you going to the ship the darker and easier the ambience becomes this is to indicate that you're venturing deeper into the rack

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    with sound you can guide the players through the level so for example emphasizing the wind when you're close to the exits is a very effective way of letting the players know they're nearing a way out the current speed of the wind on the planet effects some of the sounds we hear inside of the derelict for example if the wind outside is heavy we're able to hear gusts coming from some of the vents around the ship which also started rattling harder as if the air found a way to pass through the broken ducts thank you for listening

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    hi I'm Josh and I'm going to talk a little about a process for designing the ambient audio of star citizen in this quick video I'm going to show you an audio system i've been prototyping for support in the outpost powerlevel States and the sound of the weather outside interacting of the outpost structure so at some point in game we're going to be attend these outposts on and off by inserting or removing the power core from the power module we really wanted to capture that feeling of Finance shelter and a safe place during a storm when the player comes in from the environment outside and turns on one of these outposts for the time being there are two states powered down powered on and all of these audio spots you see here respond to that state so if I just bring down the power level parameter here and wise you'll hear the audio transition to the power down state this

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    brings up the general ambient room tone of the place as well as bringing in some of the sounds of the structure and all the machinery settling back into their resting state after being powered down eventually when we have animations for the outpost power up and power down sequences you'll really be able to see and hear the outpost generator spooling up and down we're also a prototype in a sound system to cover the idea of the outpost structure reacting to the weather outside the outpost so this isn't set up in game yet and as the audio team were downstream and we rely on a lot of the game systems working before we can do a lot of the interesting stuff we want to do but we can start preparing for when we eventually have a system like this by generating our own parameters and wise to prototype with so this parameter temp wind speed allows us to hear how this

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    system might work in game so this is what we call a blend container which allows us to crossfade between different sounds depending on the information that we get from the game here we'll cross fade in between different wind speeds based on the wind speed outside and here were triggering sounds of the structure creaking vibrating and moving suddenly when the wind hits a certain speed and stays there we also have a new system on the audio code side called the audio propagation system which basically allows us as sound designers to get a lot more useful information about the way that sound can travel between different rooms and areas to reach the listener for example the wind and creeks emitters on the exterior of the outpost sections are aware of the atmospheric conditions outside so they know not to activate if they want to fly it without

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    an atmosphere and they know to activate if they want a planet with an atmosphere these outposts have been a great way to explore ambience that reacts to meaningful game parameters which is an area of the game sound that is only going to get more and more crucial as development continues so we have a quick listen to that in game music plays a big part in in guiding

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    play emotionally through the game we have so many associations with music you know due to film and other games of course and for our game is no real exception we kind of it's it's better to you know pull you through and you know it can be manipulative but when it's done weld it's kind of a seamless overall contribution to a narrative experience and and on that note his Philip is Maude to tell you about that we've recently been working on expanding our music content for the pu this includes new music for space stations running zones moons and other points of interest to get new music in the pu we start by drafting a composition request these typically include concept our playthrough captures reference tracks and music direction from chris Roberts and Leonardo audio director and the wider audio team these are sent unto our PU composer Pedro

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    Camacho and through discussions back and forth iterations and polish we get to a point where we can implement the final keys in the game at the moment we're experimenting with new implementation methods to increase the perceived variation of these music use we're currently doing this by bookending each main key with specifically composed intro and outro variants however we're looking to further expand this in 3.1 and beyond by adding additional stem variation with each of these current elements so here's a quick video about a recent music addition and how it's been implemented with these intro outro variants so in the 3.0 release we added music - Alice our left key and grim hex and for this video we're going to take a closer look at one of the grim hex keys ok so here we are in the wise project and the track we're going to look at

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    today is grim hex - so in this playlist container we've got multiple intros are multiple outros and the main body loop there ok so let's get into the structure of the playlist container so this is a sequence container which calls three run containers first one holding all of the intros the second holding main body piece and the last one is holding all of the outro tracks so the idea behind this is when the game triggers this grim hex track it will randomly select from one of these three intros then transition into the main

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    body piece and then transition into a randomly selected outro one of these three here now the reason we've done this is to provide a greater degree of variation for this cinematic cue so you're not always hearing the same intro and the same outro giving you a bit more of a varied music experience in these locations so let's go ahead and trigger this grim hex cue and see how the intros are randomly selected now let's take a look how these sections

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    transition using this random functionality with a couple of edits in the interest of time okay so let's take a quick look at the

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    grim hex level in the editor and just quickly go through how the music is implemented in the level okay so here we are at the grim Hanks location and you can see there are two red spheres now these are music areas so the larger sphere correlates to the Armistice zone boundary when you're in there it will play an arms are sewn ambient q now we've designated these to be friendly neutral and outlaw so paulís are being friendly luskey being neutral and here greenheck's being outlaw so whilst you in that sphere it will trigger the outlaw ambient music now the smaller red sphere is the music area which triggers the cinematic cue for grim ax B it grim hex one or two so as you enter that location

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    you should be welcomed with one of the cinematic cues with the multiple intros main body piece and multiple outros and once that is complete it will default back to the outlaw ambient music this type of music implementation for points of interest in the pu is still a work in progress and currently quite rudimentary however this is a system that we do want to fully flesh out in the future so the next time you're heading out to port olisar left ski or grim hex just take a moment and listen out for these new ambient and cinematic cues I hope you've enjoyed this quick video thanks for watching story narrative always sort of thing having a lot of people they they immediately think of you know dialogue what's the spoken word and that is a big

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    part of it you know how characters interact with each other that defines narrative and all this sort of thing but it all is a synergy I think between all of the sonic elements and in our obscene music is another one it's kind of it's quite on the nose you understand when it's happening but sound design as well sound effects it all comes together I mean I've got a sound design background myself and I all have to work together and reinforce the same stuff yeah all it all is one so it's yeah again that's in terms of a story and the narrative and the emotional kind of fundamentals of the game I think where we say that the sound comes in through the back and you know visuals coming through the front and that's kind of we're trying to meet in the middle and that's what we do with all the stuff that we do with in the audio team that's that's what we what

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    we're doing and that's what all about thanks guys so really cool how many different audio components go into making a ship sound realistic or intense the effect is almost musical sound design really does add a whole dimension of immersive storytelling that can't be achieved by visuals on their own yes and speaking of visuals last weekend we held the screenshot contest in honor of st. Patrick's Day and the results were impressive and pretty hilarious so thanks to all of you who risked the brutal hangover to party in the verse and share the results with us and congratulations to the winner and I did have a brutal hangover on Sunday yes you did due to popular demand we're keeping the official squadron 42 t-shirts on sale through the end of the month so grab one while supplies last GOG is fokin remains on sale for couple more weeks our first concept shift of 2018 is one of the more versatile and career-minded ships we've

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    ever released so if you want to know more about its planned ingame functionality check out the QA on our website where the ship's designers answer your questions about Vulcan if you happen to be attending GDC in San Francisco stop by the Intel booth to try out star citizen alpha 3.1 and chat with some members of the team or stop by the bar citizen meetup this evening which will be going down at Louie's bar at 7 p.m. PST and if you're in Southern California William wise Baum one of the writers for star citizen and squadron 42 very talented individual will be appearing at WonderCon in Anaheim this Saturday he'll be joining fallout 2's chris howell on Omen sites Jenice Davis and Call of Duty World War two's Cameron Dayton for a presentation on writing four games on Saturday at 10 a.m. PST early that's all for this week remember to check out tomorrow's special

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    episode of reverse averse live at 12 p.m. PST where Chris will chat with Jared about 3.2 planning and potential quality of life improvements we'd like to hear from you about that's very exciting and make sure to check out the new episodes of calling all devs that aired earlier this week for answers to back of questions about radar displays high velocity e VA and all kinds of electronic warfare a big thank you as always to our subscribers for sponsoring our shows yes and of course thank you to all our backers your support lets us continue to make star citizen and squadron 42 the best they can be until next week we'll see you around thanks for watching for the latest and

34. 00:29:27

    greatest in star citizen a squadron 42 you can subscribe to our channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library