It’s time for Reverse the Verse with the U.K. team in Manchester.
As is with any information on our transcripts and summaries, everything posted is subject to change by CIG and in some cases may not always be 100% accurate at the time. While we strive for accuracy, mistakes do happen so please let us know if you find something amiss that we didn’t catch. Enjoy the show!
[Matteo, what do you do?]
Sound Design in general, think of it as there’s no sound in the game and sound designers make all the sounds that exist from ships to ambience, to characters talking, if you hear anything other than silence, that’s his job. He’s been working on the project for around a year and a half now.
[What have you worked on in Star Citizen?]
When he first joined he did the sounds for the Avenger, also focused on the Xi’An Scout and did some ambience work.
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[Have you worked on Wwise before?]
Yes, his graduation was all based on Wwise, it was fortunate he was able to join when he did and help transition the team from the original sound tech to Wwise. Wwise allows you to manipulate sounds in real time and give more detail otherwise not possible.
[How do you adjust the sounds during the soundstorm that make it so it doesn’t overwhelm?]
It’s about making sure sounds heard are different based on where you are in the sandstorm, a combination of triggers and placement balances that.
[How did the sandstorm form?]
A combination of sounds layers of to get it to where they were happy with it, and then triggers and adjusting the levels to best suit those triggers needs, bringing some up, and some down.
Wwise allows you to try different variations in real time and get very creative.
[How do you do the different sounds a ship does when it starts]
He doesn’t really have an answer, but they don’t know how a specific ship needs to sound until they start to populate the ship, each ship has their own library and they start experimenting.
[You’re reworking some of the Xi’An Scout sounds? What does that entail?]
One of the things the ship didn’t have was real time parameters such as when the ship pitches and rolls, no response from the thrusters based off how much strain it’s having put on it. This will give players more feedback.
[How do all these dynamic sound effects mesh with the music?]
It doesn’t really require much work to be honest. It’s about mix states at that point, your job is to make sure that the ambience and everything is good and Wwise will take care of the rest.
[How do you create audio for things humanity has never heard before?]
It’s mostly playing with the different instruments you have. One of the tools he uses allows him to create electric sounds which produce a lot of non human sounds. He apparently recorded dogfood being poured and vegetables and getting creative with manipulating it in real time.
[Regarding planetary sounds, how difficult will it be to make procedural sounds pertain to biomes?]
It will sound different! They can have blend triggers which change their noise based off parameters such as day, night, and the weather. They have the tech, still ironing it out.
[Vehicle art directors have hardly anything to do at this time right?]
[Laughs] There’s a lot to do, some which he can’t talk because they involve Squadron 42 and some PU stuff which he can’t talk about either.
[What can you tell about how story affects your decisions?]
It’s a double edged sword, as a Vehicle Artist you want to follow a trait, a style to make a ship a certain way, but a ship without a history has no connection that can be made with it. If you can create a story by adding little things that make a player wonder what happened to this ship or who this person is that took control of that ship. It’s a break for artists to work on that kind of personalisation, especially Squadron 42.
[Is the Redeemer on the pipeline?]
The Redeemer came from TNGS and it was at a time when the project was in its early days, and it was nice to have someone make a ship for them, but later down the line they realized they didn’t have everything sorted out yet, so now it’s about bringing it up to the standards that current ships are built around.
[Will Starfarer captains get a chair in the captain’s quarters?]
Yes, it’s amusing because the artist who made that was Matt and it was an ongoing joke as they were making it because a few people were like, where does the captain sit? It wasn’t put in during concept, but it will get put in. Jared says if INN needs to bold one piece of important news from today’s RtV this is the one, according to him.
[Will we see a Javelin in its “normal” state anytime soon?]
That depends on the boss. There’s two internal areas that still need to be done, one is the cargo. The ship has been designed pretty well so it’s been a cool ship to make.
[How much did working on the Idris help you when making the Javelin?]
They helped alot, you reuse a lot of styles that are in place for Aegis and you can essentially block out the entire ship with existing assets. With how current guides are, for example a MISC ship with a substantial interior may take 40% less time because of assets in the game, it’s the 60% that makes it unique.
[Have you started the process of what the interior of a capital ship by RSI is like?]
Yes, the Bengal which has been in production. There’s the hangars, the bridge is four stories high with an additional two stories above that. There’s the corridors, ready room, habitation, toilets, showers. They’ve done a lot of stuff already and Dan did the raw concept for what bulkheads should look like. RSI walls for example will slope away from you at 30 degrees or away from you. The Bengal is a bit simpler in art because it needed to be which dictated the art style to an extent.