Star Citizen Live: Audio - Design & Programming

8 November 201901:00:331,502 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:14
hey everybody welcome to another edition of star citizen live this time with the audio team audio design and programming I'm your host Jared have to be in joining us on the show here from beautiful sunny actually suddenly start no that's just the stage that's just the light not the Sun was coming on not here but I feel great perpetual gray joining us here and you're not sunny Winslow three members from the audio team let's start from the left from the far left and just tell everybody who you are and what you do for star citizen I'm Josh and I'm sound designer on the audio team and we just had a big segment explaining what sound designers do on is yesterday so I'm not going to ask you to repeat that today no deleting my collarbone how much you know my name is Phil Pierce woods and I'm the
00:01:04
lead sound designer and beard maven for the audio team absolutely yeah yeah I grow one every six months and I'll just reset it was never as epic as yours let's face it but well I haven't had a happy beard and like your I spend enormous on graves two years it was always epic that's never coming back and last but certainly not least Graham tells who you are and and you have to tell us what you do for starters only because you're not a designer okay well hello my name's Graham Phillips and I'm lead audio programmer I wear mostly brown and I try my best to provide tools for these guys to make the game sound amazing so yeah so we have two audio designers want audio programmer on the show this week if you haven't yet left yesterday I'm inside star citizen we did a nice little kind
00:01:51
of lifestyle piece updating on the life and times of Audio designers working for c IG today we are answering questions live about either sound design or sound programming we did put up a question in spectrum early this week to start collecting questions earlier so we're going to start with those questions while we go through these you can submit your questions for consideration into the twitch chat by pressing your question with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets I'll help us pull it out from all the other chat and of course remember if you want a good shot at your question actually being asked and then answered make sure it actually deals with audio design and audio programming and not is a not staging your question as a backdoor question to find out what when we're adding flora and fauna fauna to the game which one of the most uploaded questions
00:02:41
in the spectrum thread was was basically one of those sitcom things or it's like yeah what kind of sounds you guys playing to do when you are at fauna to the game and what kind of funded you are you intend to work on first about when in your schedule do intend to work I mean it's like it's like okay your question was about fun it wasn't about but okay so right off the bat can we expect to be able to detect mechanical malfunctions or problems or disruptive components before they fail by audio cues basically you know obviously is more and more the component system comes online you know show regulators and and and generators and so like that as they wear down will there be subtle audio cues that people can listen to so that
00:03:28
they know you know that rattle means something's not quite right like it's the performing okay right now but I maybe better go take a look at it yes that's definitely the plan the only stuff we don't touch sounds to any mmm components other than like thrusters and the quantum drive and stuff at the moment but as we start to add sound to power plants and life-support and avionics and marketing stuff they definitely will make sound from the location where the component is and based on the condition of the component and all arcane stuff its degradation level its help out how much it's powered on all that kind of stuff will definitely off sounds coming from those locations so you'll be able to tell roughly the state of it based off the sound we already kind of do this at the moment just based on the ship's overall health so the sound of all of the movement sounds on the ship and even the
00:04:18
ambience of the ship now changes based on how damaged the ship is and we also turn off the vibrations when the ship is more damaged which is cool that was a relatively recent addition I think maybe three six yeah how difficult is it one of the things we talked about a night scene was how difficult it is to mix from multiple perspective because you can never quite tell where the player is going to be when you when you're when you're doing something like that when you're trying to communicate the health of an entire ship do a player through sound how challenging is that didi do you mix it for the pilot seat yeah lay as default yeah you start with the first-person perspective pilot seat you mix for that first I guess what with like a single seat a fighter you do you know you'd expect to
00:05:06
hear all that stuff from just the pilot seat cuz there's no other no other perspectives really but um yeah it's quite a challenge really especially like first-person pilots see third-person exterior camera is all good but then testing it from like in a large ship like kind of getting like you know fly getting the ship to be flowing while you walk around it and check it sounds good from other rooms and stuff can be quite the Challenger and yeah you never really gave perfect people are started filling out the interiors of show like hey guys I'm on the bottom on the bottom here the components I'm Ariel weird noise you guys hear something yeah anything up there we're gonna have this we kind of want to have this idea of like different
00:05:54
like think about what the engineer and the engine bay would think think about what the person in the drone Bay would think what the word would he have nothing but here what the you know the turret gunner needs to hear all this kind of stuff and then we've got like a1 all these multi-crew things almost elyda fied then we've got like a list of like roles and think of an audio mix for each of those roles rather than just each room yeah what are the questions from the chat was where is the sound of flybys we've had players in the game for some time possibly yeah I would love to check and they were reimplemented as part of the new flight model quite a while ago and then I found a problem with them and fix that a little while ago and
00:06:44
haven't checked them in a while and I know they've generally got a bit quieter and it takes a bit more of a kind of crazy flight maneuver to trigger the loudest one and maybe people aren't just aren't getting up to those kind of speeds and atmosphere anymore and we need to readjust fill up but yeah they're saying that they're basically been toned way down yeah like that I remember the Buccaneer flyby used to do just massively cool yeah big engines those big Drake engines are running by that's nautical but uh yeah you know that's one of the things that's continuously balanced and realist and so all right will we eventually get to hear the effects of our own voices in proximity boy for instance when we're in a cave we currently don't hear our own
00:07:33
echo or reverb but we can hear everybody else's yet that is absolutely planned it does come with its own challenges compared with just hearing the effects on other players voices because other players voices we receive over the network and we can play the effects on them immediately in terms of the players voice you speak the game hears it and then the game applies effects and there's like an inherent latency in that and we we need to minimize that latency prevents it from being a kind of emergent breaking effect because it needs to be an effect adds to what you're experiencing doesn't take anything away from it so I expect we all need to create bespoke effects for the players that slightly different reverbs to what we're hearing when everyone everybody else but then ultimately feel the same you know a lot of the tech is already there we just
00:08:20
need to spend a little time kind of tweaking it and making it do its thing yeah it's gonna be in there at some point we all sort of consider feedback right if you're hearing your own voice propagate back through the game and that's getting picked up on your microphone and then just going through again and so there's some practical limitations like maybe resulting people having to wear headphones more often you are the other thing where you struggle to talk because you hear your own voice slightly delayed you want to know that we won't be playing back your own voice because we're not trying to create a voice jammer here be adding yourself Reverb tailor your voice mmm-hmm in effects this appropriate to the area and it shouldn't be anything that kind of you know makes you feel like you're drunk okay the chat says sound seems to have been greatly improved in 30.7 thank you that was all
00:09:08
me could you summarize the work that was done none of that was me you guys okay what you do in 317 well we start off with a massively talented all your team and the guys are really good at what they do and they'll see like issues and drip on hot fixes and stuff but primarily we're just supporting the upstream features and content that comes down the pipe and the tech and tools are constantly improving we work closely with fullier programmers so they helped was get sounds in more streamline the process and stuff so we can have more time to spend on iteration and stuff like that I think in the past few patches we've been reintroduced a lot of like dynamic mixing things didn't we so like you know we can learn if like in the past I think if there was like 25
00:09:55
ships on screen at once you'd hear them all and it would just kind of become a bit of a bit of a mushy soup of sound and now you can you know we can focus in on the ships that are the most other closest to you or otherwise the most important and just play those ones mm-hmm so the rest of them down are all are kind of stuff so you hear it might seem it'll seem cleaner and more punchy when really there's just actually less stuff going on more focused mix yeah yeah so less is more approach which is partly about making the mix clearer and it's also partly about optimizing the game because we want to preserve your frame rate as much as we possibly can mm-hmm it's always a it's always a battle with resources really Chad says you didn't left has the best hair ever which left your left Milo you're on my satellite it's like you've got States
00:10:43
right but yeah you were left so I don't know what he means Esther what one of you how does it sound Jared and it has the Harrison and see what else from the chat here what kind of changes are planned regarding dynamic sound adjustment based on how miss peer pressure like for instance sounds becoming quieter and more muffled as air pressure approaches zero so there's some work I'm going to improve the way that audio propagates through different areas and we have a system in game already which allows us to have different pressures in different areas so we can have a highly pressurized room and then a lower pressure atmosphere outside and then beyond that no air pressure as you leave
00:11:31
the atmosphere and I'm currently working a lot of tech that's going to accumulate those effects and then apply them at the point where the sounds heard so we should be seen at some point over the next couple of releases I would say we should be seeing some great improvements on how the pressure path from the sounds of the player is represented by what you hear so if they have any bearing on size booms well I mean it has a bearing on everything because it's a it's a core sort of feature of the tech so it's gonna be applied to everything as far as the sound designers wish to use it so yeah I mean sonic booms are there a special case really because we don't actually we don't represent the speed of sound in the sense that you don't of
00:12:19
hear things so much later after the event we have considered doing that at some point and we maybe will but then you know sonic booms are a different thing because we have different atmospheric pressures so it's not as straightforward as what it's a sonic boom on earth it's like a sonic boom can happen at completely different speeds depending on the atmosphere that you're in seems that every time that we do a audio base show that question comes up to some points yeah see if let me get it out of the way I would just get it out of the way right there let's see does the audio team know of any tech out there that could possibly make the non bespoke characters at admin desks and shops have more variation in their voices without having different actors for each one so basically the same with a sheer volume of NPCs you do anything to make their voices sound different
00:13:08
besides just recording different people right now the answer is no we can apply pitching effects and filtering and things like that and it always just sounds unnatural so we like to stick with you know the quality of stars' it isn't the whirring for it we want it to sound real so we don't want to make anything that we have sound any worse than it already does and that's a terrible stain generate the audio at all what I should have said but we are always keeping on top of developments in machine learning ai and as soon as we feel like it's a good time for us to start to investigate that we certainly will because we know that yeah we've already got there the DNA tech that allows us to have a huge
00:13:57
variety of different faces and we need to match that in audio somehow but the tech just isn't quite there yet Google are probably the only company in the world that has enough data to actually synthesize in a realistic way any voices but we will keep an eye on it and we will consider it any you know if at some point it becomes feasible for us let's see okay is there been any progress on how sounds will change over distance in different environments such as the sound of a gunshot being fired from the perspective of the person firing who is at the top of a canyon or some of this right now so first of the sound of the target would hear it was shot down inside the canyon yeah this ties in to the propagation tech that I was talking about before so in that instance once this tech is ready that sound will pick
00:14:46
up the effects as it travels so the sound happening on the top of a canyon will pick up appropriate reflections for that area and then it will travel down into the bottom of the canyon and it will have those effects applied as well so if you hear it when you stood next to it you're going to pretty much hear just the sound of it on the top but if you have the listener down in the canyon you're gonna hear the accumulated effects of that sound traveling ships are getting new carpet display systems they're probably talking about the new annunciator panel stuff like that are you doing are we what are we doing to prove the ship sound effects for inside the conference as well to match the visuals well for this one we actually reached out to community in the speaking to an engineer from the Australian Air Force yeah and now but that was meows
00:15:36
catfishing oh yeah it was not you let your Australian accent is also on point I'm and yeah we taught for like over an hour about the warning systems or audio systems you get in aircraft and stuff like that and historically we started to try and design a UI sound for every different type of UI notification you can get in a ship like missiles locked on to you you're locked in someone else's enemies nearby all that kind of stuff um and it becomes like a language that you have to learn and if we change that per manufacturer and per ship then you've always got a real learn its language and in in real life the aircraft have a very limited amount of audio warnings is like major all the way at major so minor 102 watch it and they Basie and that's where the non-si air
00:16:22
power comes in it's like hey something critical you look down and then visually it tells you what the actual specific issue is so with the introduction of the enunciate plans it allows us to to clear that up and come with a very clear intuitive sound design to support that yeah I chat is asking about poop sound effects so we're going back to the thread will it be possible to disable enable some of the ships speech messages and/or used custom wav files for events like I can incoming missile what do you think like like people replacing the soundscape for the ship with custom stuff so we only did that with the the jukebox where the players could drop in their own yeah you could drop your own
00:17:10
music in yeah and we don't offer that as a minute with ship speech we do I'm fairly sure you can choose the level of verbosity verbosity on the ship's B so maybe we can offer more options there yeah but yeah in terms of custom wire files that's not something we're considering right now but we never ruin hanging out surround sound is and has been very bigger and star citizen for a long time now to this person center channel is very muted and the directionality of sound isn't it all there what's wrong with starts that is to surround support and then they there's just a string of expletives here I won't read those long in showbiz yes so I we were developing a big focus on headphones and stereo and there wasn't
00:18:01
too many considerations for testing and designing stuff for surround discreetly but recently there's a bigger focus on that we've got a stuff stuff with adhesive the 5.1 room with some really nice speakers and it's something where we're aware of the community is talking about it so now when we're testing things were highly acute of how things translate from from stereo and in 5-1 or because they are poorly rendered wise or scale up to whatever playback system you've got within reason right there's only so many configurations of those we can test but it's absolutely something we're aware of now you're talking about the new Apollo Apollo room yeah yeah actually that was actually wrong where we thumbed yeah ever I see acronyms man do we have any intention to allow people
00:18:50
to communicate with others outside of the game for example people that are sitting on spectrum we've talked about the ability that is before making voice compatible with spectrum so that you could talk to people like okay what are you doing it's like I'm traveling here is whatever the oh okay well the hold on let me pretend not to work and then you jump in the game I think oh we've talked about chap communication between game and that what about voice chat I don't know Graham you're the voice dude well just off the top of my head our boy tech is detached from game servers and detached from the game in such a way that that wouldn't be impossible it's certainly not our main focus right now because we want to make sure the VoIP experiencing game is as good as it possibly can be and you know
00:19:39
that's why a lot of the focus has been on making it die jet making all the effects work within the game but is certainly something that would be technologically possible and also I think it would add something to the game if we were to do that because you could effectively kind of you could have someone who's sat at a home playing in the game and someone else who's got the spectrum app on their phone and they could literally ice out on the train coming home from work and they could literally call each other I think that will be amazing so I think we should a bro my all's are yeah I'm a Manchester sender yeah I'm in the trade station I'll be there surely I mean you could essentially do that with third-party apps like discord now so it's one of those things when it comes to prioritizing it's do you prioritize something that is already
00:20:27
available through a third party something or do you prioritize things that are uniquely star citizen is imagined as a difficult consideration yeah I think in order for us to we need to be competitive with discord in order for people to use our voice solution because they've they've got the option of just switching it off and using discord so you know obviously we have to consider those options if we want to be truly competitive the next question from chat is another one that comes up every time we do one of these audio shows bouncing out that one voice attack the possibility of doing our own voice activated commands mm-hmm have we made any progress and then further considerations on that at this point there has been some initial investigation into what tech would be required because this is star citizen we
00:21:15
wouldn't want it to be anything but the best implementation a voice attack that it could be so there's a heck of a lot of work to get through before we can actually offer that in game but it is certainly something that's always been on chris Roberts wishlist and it remains in our backlog and at some point we will get around to it question from the chat said do you consider discrete audio components an essential aspect of star citizen and III don't know if they're talking about like but like people spend a lot of time you know you know building up CPUs and RAM and video cards and anything do you do would you consider have high-end audio equipment a compulsory thank for it to play star citizen Oh is like an audio interface and all yeah for the playback experience yeah I'm
00:22:05
guessing that's what they mean there yeah I honestly would say no I would say if you've got a working audio system and a good set of speakers and headphones we need if you're gonna spend the money that's where I'd spend it on in the output medium generally you know sound cards or sound cards and they if they work they work and that's good enough and it's our job to make it sound good on the like very low-end stuff as well it should be a great experience and about water playback system is right yeah we'd like we've got recommended minimum spec and spends like ten thousand pounds on some studio monitors then we're sweet right no these leaders sound good all night you know why the lot of check logitech speakers or anything like that of the speakers are available or headphones so I have to make sure that we cater to that so he's asking about the ship voices know how
00:22:57
many ship voices do we have in game right now how many different ship voices oh I don't know that's more of a question for Bob he's a dialogue lead but it's one per manufacturer so however many from manufacturers we have and that goes down to like consolidated Outland and Argo whoo and we have like a couple ships there they have their own yeah well everyone every money poorly should have yeah the questions about a comment that was made a long time ago about the possibility of switching those out basically like say you really prefer the Drake and Betty mm-hmm but you really want to fly your your consolidated Outland ship mm-hmm have we because where are we at with the any consideration towards being able to swap those well we could make it possible if
00:23:46
we investigate into it rather than tying it to the ship it'd be like a a profile attached to the player kind of thing my ship component yeah yeah yeah we've got that we have the assets I'm sure we can build the technology to be able to swap out based on the question player but nothing would be investigated at the moment nope yeah there's like voice box can you feel it's not enough and I get off fader and joses the thing I've always thought the best a GPS voice we've been Gilbert Godfried because imagine him yelling at you when you when you miss your turn boy and bless you to be awesome alone yeah small you microphone before you say that question is actually it's too
00:24:35
similar to it's about the do you plan the density of the atmosphere and compositional influence how things will sound us that's just like we had before yeah are you planning to change the sound signature kuan drives for each different model quantum drive we're already seeing some different visual effects with that required drives from different the bunny like how much differentiation do we want in the sound well if it's if it looks drastically different more and supports it and if there's different manufacturers and different lore and all that kind of stuff then while trying to pull it in line with what the law says and but recently we we've updated that et sounds because we we hadn't properly supported shorter QT jumps because of all these like slingshot jumps and stuff like that so we've rewrote that to make
00:25:23
it sound a bit better and but yeah if it actually is different in the game then we'll support it and give it a different sound for the folks that are asking UI questions those are for the UI team and not for the C I'm gonna ask this question mm-hmm cuz I'm curious what your answer is what's up with the garbled intercom public announcement messages and all those are who wants to take that one I deny that so we'll talk about it something mysterious seems to be happening that's all we know everybody seems like it's related to something though yeah nobody willing to put the job on the line don't put me in that
00:26:12
situation there is okay that's the path I'm something cool let's see how do you silence a laser this is for question two there yeah what you do is you take something is it inherently styling anyway sound cool and then the there's a feature request support silence tears on energy weapons there we go okay why do these silences cuz you made them sound loud right but yeah you've got ballistic weapons got energy weapons needs it sound cool and stuff like that and for gameplay reasons if you need it you've silenced one you use BOTS answers on the other and stuff like that so you know if we had how think would be fun if you had energy weapons that were completely silent you've been walking around and then just headshot down at the old counter-strike days
00:27:00
where you just don't have a chance and so basically you need needs it sound cool and then we need for gameplay mechanics need to put silencers on them and make them sound silent so we look cool I've got the bet I got the fault of that how can we hear sounds in a vacuum I'm just gonna well what we want is to create a cool thing right and you have a rule of cool like Star Wars cinematic stand in space but you've all got the full spectrum of like also game dance like the the film gravity where's all that contact stuff there's no sound propagation in space so we got to make a game that's fun and but what we're playing with at the moment is the concept of sound simulation so there's
00:27:49
already current technology there's a great TED talk where they've got this high speed high frame rate camera and they can they filmed a leaf there's no microphones on it and next to the leaf out the shot was a loud speaker playing mary had a little lamb and there's an algorithm that they run this footage through and they can recreate the sounds from the vibrations that they filmed on the leaf which is awesome so we thought that's some great in law like explanations for why we can hear sound in space so a plane with the idea of having this sound simulation unit component in your ship it all unwise light waves and vibrations and then play back what you would sound like in a pressurized environment so that's how we can justify hearing sounds in space boy it also gives us the ability to say like okay well that's half the full spectrum that's not a cake
00:28:36
and eat it too so that's how the gravity asked sound arrangement and the full Star Wars stuff so you're flying around space bars all cool you can hear everything you know where everything is behind you all that kind of stuff and then you get a impede and they look so cool and then you just all you hear is your ship and you see all the stuff going on the actually you can't hear it and that's terrifying so again it makes you feel really like isolated alone and vulnerable because all you're hearing is your ship just creaking you're this husk and so all you stuff powers up and you get that a sense back again so that's how we kind of justify it yeah we got to play it so we can take it away interesting gameplay reason CR has been known you know over the years to say something along the lines of you know we take things to the point of realism mm-hmm then we bring them back to the
00:29:23
point of fun mm-hmm you know it's at the end of the day you know it video games are an entertainment medium they're meant to provide us an entertaining experience and yeah going through the entire game in muted silence would be pretty tedious but giving it to you you just said a few minutes of giving it to you so that we can take it away at key moments though is that it aspired as an inspired choice and I like that a lot all right will there be sound bleed through walls again this comes back to the propagation work that I was talking about earlier so the plan will be that if there's a an open path for a sound to travel to you you will hear it through that path but if the doors are all closed you probably will want to hear it sort of muffled
00:30:10
bleeding through the wall it's a tech that I don't have working yet but it's definitely on the plan so yes though will there I've said it what could imagine is that scene from The Shining was the blood pouring I elevates it with sound bleeding through the walls but yeah yeah once I had a lot more like positional detail and like kind of you know confidence for the players in you know localizing where someone else is near them you know kind of thing yeah much like an omission my FPS machine video coughs not being in here yeah people in the next room get my room but through the pole through the doorway over yeah it'd be really good interesting question from the chat gran were you aware of anything like ray-tracing which is all the rage right now yeah prevent but for sound yeah I
00:30:59
mean it can be done you can you can retrace and pick up you can read trace and pick up the materials from the reflections and you can figure out sort of what effect those materials should have you know a bumpy material should make the sound more diffuse or as a solid reflective surface would do exactly what it expected we may be very reflective in terms of audio as well but that's the kind of thing like in the audio team tech like that would always be something that hangs off the visual tech so really we gotta have the ray tracing on the visuals before we can think about having it on the audio so that's where we are one of the questions do you plan to add a mixer audio mixer so that we can balance our own audio features by basically breaking down a bit break banging down on the discreet
00:31:47
audio options so that people can adjust their own mix I'm against the idea I think if we were to give you say like an ambience lighter a Foley slider weapon volume slider and all that stuff then they would allow people to get a competitive advantage over the people by just you know turning down the ambience boosting the Foley boosting the weapons and turning about everything else yeah and importantly making the game sound terrible in favor of those trying to get a contest no I just think if we've done our job
00:32:37
properly and you know we've created a really really good mix then people who won't have any need for that in the first place so we have toyed with the idea of having sound profiles that like saying I'm not the cruise ship based on role and stuff like that so if your pilot you'll hear a certain set of a certain mix if you're an engineer but you're different you know just tailoring the sound experience to whatever the role is if you're in a seat and stuff like that well giving them given the back is on players at full control over the mix may not be the best way what what's that affected you have to spend the most time getting just ready what's your LWOP oh what's your white whale what's the sound effect that nearly killed you the Bonnie defender
00:33:28
yeah yeah that's quite a while yeah just yeah because we've never made a bunny ship before and there was nothing to go up there's no previous work to look under all right that's that's how it that's the ballpark of what this one should sound like it huh takane oh yeah come up with from scratch so we did like a design spec brief yeah you know they're tribal cheap you'll arrive you're understaffed yes first apartment live and all stuff is prepared for alien yeah it's not like property it's not normal thrusters and it's likeéoh exactly its proper alien yeah you did a great job there's not one you know one moving part wasn't there and I was just like one week of like Tara have been like can I come in am I am ia good sound is that can I do this how do you how do you make some of this never been made before
00:34:24
what do you reference this has no reference yeah we talked a little bit about that it didn't quite make it in the episode but in the interviews we talked about that that sometimes the hardest thing is the complete unknown it's it's it's being being suffocated by possibilities yes no there's a great phrase the iOS refer back - and it's if you if you go if you get given a completely clean slate do anything you want it's being paralyzed by the possibility of infinity so if you sit there you can blue sky thing you can do anything you want you go where do I start where do I begin but if you're giving like some restrictions you can find creativity in their adversity breeds creativity absolutely when I first joined the company the Audion doctor at the time was like right got this mobile glass system and we need I could fall UI sweet
00:35:12
and now with the UI stuff it's like it's like a language like positive negative good bad you know happy sad kind of stuff and tracking movement and I was like man I suck at you I like don't make me do design go back exactly why you should do it and I was like right so it's playing with loads of sin so making it sound or sci-fi and swishing and stuff was like now that sucks and what I did it was called Moby glass so I thought as well clever and got loads of sample libraries of like glass breaking cracking like screech and all that kind of stuff I said I'm gonna use this as my source and only that to generate all my my sound effects further Moby glance and I got some really good results for the first pass and stuff and I took it's a lot of directing it's like yeah that's great it's just you got all these frequencies in there you don't need for you I am oh okay then Rebecca nice pen probably two weeks solid just doing this
00:36:02
UI system it said all right it's not about you I'm doing later I started for the that's what I did for the van to defend it was like when I realized I was struggling just kind of sat and found a bunch of sounds that I thought were obvious it and like all in the same ballpark the same kind of aesthetic and then put them in a folder and I might have got to do this just with these yeah like the odd exception where like so actually so when you're given a fairly wide open task that the thing that work best for you was actually to constrain yourself when you when you're when you're forced into constrictions and and working within what's possible and so that you get Star Wars when you can make anything that you want with with no limits you get been a menace yeah pressure makes diamonds right yeah well I mean I cover the answer that one
00:36:51
because I don't I don't make sounds I just make sounds happen so was there anything one in you make happen you beat your head against it well yeah I guess there's you know sometimes we get asked to create effects and one of them recently was we're gonna be doing a distress call thing I think and then the idea was to make that distort in a new and interesting way that kind of reflects that it's difficult to reach and this kind of thing so that was a fairly open task but then you know having said that there's only so many ways you can distort a sound so but just I just make them all available players like rubber band design something that we're like you write as a plugin no plugins that we all buy and use you just wait for I'm sure gross we should take it's much cheaper just to write once have you had a quick
00:37:46
question repeat it I lost it it just passed by too much well voice modulators for like bounty hunters or criminals people who want to disguise their voices in the game good thing mm-hmm well we can like push for an unlock where we just get the players go it's really and but that was I would tie into the like voice propagation stuff I bands it enemies avoid feature potentially and I think it would be a very interesting one to implement and so you know because I find it interested as a task I'll probably do it but I just thought the point on that you know the one they do in all the movies where they put a cloth over the telephone that doesn't work at all all those blackmail calls you will there be different sound zones and big ships with sounds changing
00:38:40
depending on how close or far away you are from certain systems that's basically yeah you already do that right not point to a point yeah yeah like we have the ambience and the ambience of the ship like so not not the movement sounds not the thruster sounds they're kind of built up in layers of like a kind of dead ambience for the room and then like kind of distant details and then really close up details but when we have sound on each component and stuff that will be yeah like they'll be like the kind of rough vibe of that component being in the room and then as you get closer to the actual thing then you'll hear all the kind of details of it all that also ties into the plans to have like different mixes per room for each kind of roll and like a multi cruise ship so
00:39:28
yeah they'll be like different sounds if you're in the engineering room there's will be a certain set of things that you need to know about as the engineer that the pilot doesn't need to know about that the turret gunner doesn't need to know about this kind of stuff we're also tying it together with saying like the load and offload of like the thrusters and engine power plants and stuff how if you're if you go full throttle then all the ambiences and tones can change slightly based on the load on the ship and stuff like that so you can mean the bridge by giving it full throttle and then the guy in engineering would hear all this stuff changing it in in relationship to the throttle and stuff also if submitting your question on caps and I am I gonna read it I see so many caps it just goes right on by guys why is there a little bit no warning I'm
00:40:17
being locked on and fired at such as alarms the sound of bullets flying past the ship help me I get shot a lot I need help maybe pilot better throw now again looking the introduction of the annunciator panel and stuff were looking to really clean that up because a lot of those UI notifications are really legacy and we just we transfer when we moved from F mod to wise a lot of them were in place there and I designed some of them there's one that sounds like a squealing pigs like we people hate it it's still in there and but yeah so a lot of those UI sounds are legacy and we'll get around to them but the trouble is we're constantly adding features and abilities to ships and stuff like that so when we when you can need a finite set of everything we need to support and we strip it back down to the major moderate and minor kind of warning stuff then it
00:41:06
would be a lot more lot not cleaner I think one of the problems of the there's too many different sounds you know norm learn the language of it curses like 12 different there's a different completely different sound for every different yeah I think that goes wrong yeah like simplifying that down so yeah like you don't really need a look at this but it's happening kind of thing like you should look at this and something really bad has happened and following that with really a really quick voice a voice message yeah that's a really good points we got a dialogue assets to convey messages buy the from waslley of what the situation is we've also got the UI notifications of what the hoods telling you is happening and then we've also got the sound effects of what's happening and stuff like that and sometimes they're all stepping over each other and some dialogue assets you know that's you long
00:41:54
for the the action like proximity warnings like danger you're about to crash into something on the left and then you've already done it kind of things so just deciding what needs voice what needs sound effects and what needs UI and you know they're like diegetic warnings like you're getting shot at and stuff or something that we're constantly changing the mix of and trying to get right like you know for like you know the sound of bullet whizzing by the ship and the sound of impacts and stuff like how loud should they be how loud should friendly ships be or near you versus enemy one zone like should the one that you're targeting be louder or the one that's targeting you be louder and all this kind of stuff like we're constantly trying to find the sweet spot with that yeah we are pushing to improve that whole experience as a pilot in a ship in star citizen because you know for a long
00:42:42
time we're we a lot of the time we find ourselves supporting every single feature and then moving on to the next feature and and now there's a bit of a push to look at that experience as a whole and improve it and make it much better gameplay experience does that extender things like the the breathing sounds notice sometimes when I'm just you know just flying I'm on combat I'm just you just fly on my way I'm in a green zone yet not a care in the world and my characters having an asthma attack your character has asthma that's well I have yes so when you when you hear breathing you actually hear me so that's all those breeding assets all recorded by myself that's right they were amount of times they threw up or
00:43:33
passed out recording that yeah so a fundamentally right now we've got to breathing sets style sets sweets to breathing sweets we've got normal default which is like fps evn stuff then we've also got piloting and the piloting set has its own set of logic and the main thing that really drives it up and down our that faster or slower breathing is g-force and stuff like that hmm so if they changed the flight model or you make some ships faster and others basic I've got one breathing sweet honey too because it's not systemic yeah and so like you know can you how many G's can you pull and stuff so like I think I had to nerf it a bit because we're just driving away to quit when the new flight model came out we have to quickly quickly adjust it because the character
00:44:21
was just freaking out all the color AGA AGSM so anti g-force training maneuver and you'd love to in takeoff yeah it's constantly being tuned and dialed in and stuff and then just brought down in volume because it I thought was really cool and my infuriating and stuff bring the breathing up a little bit just to give you that kind of isolationist feel like you really vulnerable the stuff but yeah we didn't know if it was gonna work out very well because you're the player right I am playing the game and II don't want the sound of someone breathing for you it's like when I've been the voice stuff you want you want to talk in the game if you have like emotes where a dolla boy is playing for your character
00:45:09
and calcium disconnect there and we didn't know if it was gonna work or not but actually turned out to be a pretty useful feedback mechanism just got this terrible idea of like during character creation having to sit there record a bunch of a bunch of character sounds as if our character creation sounds strange more see everybody record their own strange sounds now we've actually shared before that you did that you did the the actor feature voices sound sound effects for the for the male model yeah we haven't shows that you also did the female I didn't do the female model bugs that we had the male breathing set for a while and I we got some female audios female staff - are there plans for the
00:46:06
sounds of canopy impacts such as debris rattling against the glass or whatever I get an asteroid field there's no way that you have to already have that that might be a sign it's too quiet yeah yeah I mean yeah we really have we have that now for when you blow up when their ships been blowing off we have like a zone like extends from the point of the explosion and if you find yourself in your ship in our zone then you get debris impacts depending on how long it was since the like how dense the debris would be at that point basically we could have extend that to like random ones in the middle of an asteroid field and all that kind of stuff we're ship hasn't blown up yet no that would be cool to have well there's two cap considerations that either we can tie into was actually how many in the game is is there any particles over the
00:46:55
effects are impacting with the ship or do we just imply that you know explosion goes off when an asteroid field those conditions are true plane debris can sound so yeah I think I've become poorer on them every particle there's like interest intersection with a ship and stuff I'll just be I'll be notes now I I know that the three of you don't necessarily work with the music but does the music ever affect sound design like do you ever do one thing and then when you hear the music come in like oh that's the music that the procedural systems gonna play during this like oh maybe we want something that it's more in line with that do you it's where you go does the tail wag the dog I'm guess is what I'm asking you've got two different types of meat you've got digesting and non-diegetic so
00:47:43
diegetic is like in the location like radio or PA system stuff like that so that would be affected propagation or like in a stuff you shoot a speaker or it'll destroy and stuff but then you've got the score we just kind of got music non digest it now they don't really into like one would have really caused another one to trigger necessarily but music dynamically switch is based on the intensity all that kind of stuff and the main way they interact is probably more with a mix so what you can do is dynamically meter the frequency spectrum of the sound effects and if you deem that sound effects be more important you can bring down those frequencies in the music so you can own carving out frequencies in the music to allow the sound design to poke through or conversely you can have it all the way
00:48:29
around so if you are certain frequencies in the music you want to emphasize you can bring down their sound effects to accommodate that I think we also have to be careful that overly tonal sound design as well sometimes like you know if like there's the cinematic music for coming down to a certain planet and you know you happen to do the background planetary ambience without plumb it with a slight tonal element that is like half a step below the key of the musical or less than half a standard sound a bit funky I want to do a dramatic reenactment of how I imagined this backyard is asking this question this is a question from piss-poor Pete says why why did you say just make the larval tram door opening noise so similar to the sound of a grenade dropping in
00:49:18
counter-strike it scares me every time when opinions of Phil Pierre Smallwood do not represent those of clarify Robert space industries or its subsidiaries I got you toast I mean it yes who did the Laura Beltran door opening you call it if it's the one I'm thinking of I think it was Barney Barney yeah apparently these all weapons there is like everything there's a gunshot that Archie used loads of gun
00:50:13
mech sounds for all the mechanisms and stuff I think minigun for that need to get a gig for the doors tracking is that a speaking of the tram door sounds why don't they play a little chime before they're about to close so that people know when they're running as close to 12 minutes we should watch the video I was on intuitive designers liked about accessibility for the people who are visually impaired and it was how audio can assist people in the real world and it was talking about elevators so you know the bombs you get if it's one bong it's good the elevators going up or down
00:51:01
or two bongs yet the other way the other way so you can get an elevator not be able to see and you'll know which way the elevator is traveling yeah that was awesome so bringing those cow elements into the game would be great what are three bombs that we have on some elevate so we could have the bombs on the door x variable I think it's always different so plug on the question for this shot elevator music [Music] please hold we absolutely it's not the highest priority we got all the know
00:51:49
it's like I said we need arrived all these new locations coming online it's like you're spending a lot of time in the elevators you should probably miss him quite a lot of game there get out get out it's true okay thank you back we absolutely do there was a time when elevators were the number one killers of star citizens everywhere no I actually true story Pedro once asked me if I'd be willing to sing for elevator music really I said yeah sure but if I said I need something in the style of Girl From Ipanema and he he got actual work with workers - yes nice to have and why not - you have to focus on
00:52:37
right now the task still exists probably yeah running around a big ship can be exciting especially if running into dark of shady quarters how do you make these kinds of areas feel rusty creepy little places Josh yeah we just just kind of spent we spend a lot of time in in the level kind of getting a feel for it and thinking of like what the player should feel when they're in those kind of environments um guess it's just a lot of us it's rylynn everybody kind of this yeah that you you know try something out and then go through the whole process of walking around the ship and you know going from one place to another and seeing if that feels right and yeah it was a basic concept for say a space a
00:53:26
room a corridor Journal and you would dress each corner with an audio trigger spot and then have one in the center or like an audio area ambience it's got a bed ambience and they each kind of corner would sound slightly different and you basically static the way it looks you know and even save even support the same sound in each corner right and but this sides dark you could pitch it down a little bit and just I you know guide the players subconscious on I'm this company and you're gonna head something cool over here we'll have something trigger every like you know 10 seconds or something and there's what's really cool about her means is you can apply imply stuff that's behind the walls everything yeah I'm so if I if you're walking down this like its corridor corridors Josh I'm this like pipes in stuff I thought you can just allude to stuff being on the other side earlier if it's like habitation someone
00:54:14
have an argument but you know in the hop next door to you in stuff like that Toronto we answered that question earlier in the show you we only catch it on the replay either here on Twitch or on you do Koval have been asking to the show now that this is a design question it's a thing for shift is like ship design it's not for you guys but I want to get your opinion on on whether you'd like to see it some of people have been asking about the ability to have shipboard megaphones so like project sound out like I've been pulled over by the cops hey go over right now you know that's an awesome idea I'm gonna go back and create the task straight after this finishes because that I would play with that how would it properly the space Graham well you know that's no yeah that's a question we can overcome later isn't it let's concentrate on the ship horns as
00:55:04
well somebody was asking for horns I made me been in the question thread they want to solve and then there should be a bunch of different ringtones we should sell them right so yeah I saw a video recently of somebody approaching a few guys who were on a planet and they were flying down towards them and they were trying to speak to them but they didn't have a mechanism for that and I think this of ship loudspeaker thing is a really good idea yeah yeah we're like tahno system in ships anyway don't we so it's not too far away from that yeah yeah I just want I don't want to be able to pull up in my and my drake Cutlass and hit a button in la Cucaracha RocketBallz should just take your on the
00:55:54
sky let's see we are almost at a time gentlemen why do the helmet notification sounds sound like air escaping from my spacesuit now why do they last five seconds why not just a simple Dame or beep but n people getting confuse of elevators one thinks oh no I don't know I don't know which which none of it that one is you guys then yeah it's just the generic visor notifications yeah I don't well tastes probably that long to match the visual yeah if it sounds like air escape analysis it needs to be sorted so everything whoever sent that in does like put a post up on the spectrum of all our people take a look at it can you
00:56:42
list any ongoing issues that you're focused on fixing in the short to medium term well we all have bug lists that we're working our way through and you know if you find bugs while you're playing please report them yeah we're just we have a certainly in my case a rather large list of issues that I'm working through and to list them would certainly use it a lot more than the time we have left yeah but I mean you know I've talked a little bit about the the propagation system that I'm working on and I think that is a big issue that the game suffers from right now is that audio doesn't propagate properly so if that's something that we talk about brings back like yeah I this this goes along a lot of these questions had to do with sound
00:57:35
propagation and atmosphere yeah it's it seems to be a thing that has captured the imagination of our backers with a sound of damaged ships think missing a wing or a hull breach or whatever create different sounds flying through atmospheres like whistling noises they already do like they get more rattling and more vibration II and the health level changes the sound of the foots and stuff but you know implying some sort of like hull breach or that kind of thing be really cool like me here like it whistling behind a panel where they used to be a wing but now it's just open to open to the air because the damage system is quite dynamic different bits can come up it's not like you get 25% damage and you lose a wing yeah afternoon we in audio don't like you know there's no I don't know what's going we just know like it's not at full health wait if there are like like here
00:58:23
are items like wings there are something that changes the fundamental aerodynamics of the ship if we could tie into whatever values that the wing is now gone equals treatment thing then we can start introducing audio specifically and they'll be like feedback the degradation stuff like hey your your your ship sounds like it's batted oh that's the sound of my wing that's gone so you can learn the whistles or the rouse and stuff like that be cool it so it's all stuff we wanna do yeah damage really I saved you like 95 percent damage and you trying to come in get air table as if weather the turbulence itself would start damaging the ship my trick and wings are so that'd be cool you cannot enter atmosphere no no just get it close to that you're on chance rather to Monday we can do this alright with that we're gonna stop the show
00:59:12
before he creates any more work for you guys thank you so much for taking your time to be here on the show this week um Josh Phil and Graham Graham you stay later and see how K we're gonna talk about your background okay guys we've got one more episode of inside star citizen next week before citizencon which is just two weeks away from from from tomorrow we're not feeling the pressure at all wait just let me go do all right do I need to be there so for starters in life I'm Jared that's Phil that's Josh that's Graham that's his backlog thanks for watching for the latest and
01:00:14
greatest in star citizen 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

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