Audio Feedback Thread

Totally agree!

 

Thanks for fixing the sound issue on mods so fast! I didn't expect it today

 

No probs - thankfully a quick fix

 

I think it 'is' possible, but isn't something that is supported - it's really quite old code that we are gradually removing or cleaning up.

 

Audio team is 2 dedicated people who are experts on audio, + a variable amount of programmers who can work on the code side of things (normally from 0 up to 2, depending on what each particular audio task requires).
Regarding "old code", it's not necessarily a matter of code being old, but also a matter of requirements having changed around it. For example, we no longer offer the option to pick between OpenAL or Fmod, which means we could vastly simplify our C++ audio code. The "old code" is perfectly fine for its original purpose, but the purpose no longer exists, so we now have the opportunity to make code much simpler to work with. However, if we had a bug with, dunno, doppler effect breaking at high speeds, then that's going to have an actual effect on people who play the game, so it can be given a higher priority than merely "simplify audio code" (which affects no one but ourselves, the devs).

 

Not at the moment.

 

Not trivial to do unfortunately, so I'm afraid this will have to wait until we actually have modding support for FMOD.

 

Sound Designers, there are two of us. Seb has been here a couple of years longer than I have, and is full time. I tend to work anything between part time and full time depending on my other work load. Beam Audio is extremely reliant on the physics engine, so where other games have audio programmers creating specific code hacks to improve the audio playback over the physics engine, which would not necessarily be correct in real life, we are totally reliant on the core physics. That's why there are many things we don't support because the core physics doesn't support it currently - water splashes is a good example. We don't have any dedicated audio programmers, but we have Fabian who really helps get the lua code to utilise audio as best that he can (still within the remit that the physics system has to produce "in real life" what we need), Teri (the CTO) looks after the physics so unfortunately there are often many times where audio priority isn't as high as something else which benefits the most players of the game - and is therefore why we have a lot of requests that are a few years old, and Andrew who looks after the FMOD middleware implementation but is is currently doing a heck of a lot of work to strip out the legacy code to make all of our lives easier.

So it's not like a company like Codemasters who may have 7-8 sound designers, and additional audio programmers (a lead, a UI specialist, 2 engine audio specialists, a car recordist, a couple of more generic sound designers, a dialogue specialist, and a couple of full time audio programmers working solely on improving the audio experience.). They also have multiple sound teams, F1, GRID, WRC, NFS - where they can move people around to suit the product... and they all have bespoke acoustically treated sound rooms to work out of. We have these too, Seb as an acoustic room in Breman, and I have my own self financed little studio in the UK (photo attached).... but think about the cost of doing that for 8-10 people per project.