One question to rule them all: User Music.
You want this, internally we want it too and we’ve done it before on RCT3 so it’s not a huge leap to imagine it low hanging fruit for Planet Coaster... right?
Well....
The technical reality of this feature is that it is complex, especially because we want it to behave in a user friendly way. Ironically, it is much more involved now than it was ten years ago!
Let me explain a few reasons why:
We changed our audio tech and the new audio middleware we use (Wwise) does amazing things (you can hear that) however it cannot play user music out of the box. We need a custom solution for this because we don’t want for people to have to download Wwise, install it and follow a tutorial : ) Many people here can figure out how to do this (this is PC land after all!) but we don’t feel that solution helps our entire community. We want to do it right, which means we need our teams on engine, interface and game-logic to support a feature like that.
Another hurdle is that we do so much audio work in the game currently (which is partially why it sounds so great!) that there is in fact *less* room now for streaming your own music than ten years ago! A single coaster for instance presents more audio work than we did at any moment during rtc3. We have more than 80 sounds on a coaster (wind, tracks, whooshes, people, flanges, clangs, wheels, car rattles) all manipulated in real time to make sure whatever you build always sounds unique to that track. Just like the top of that loop on your favourite coaster always creates its own unique rhythms of clangs, bangs and resonances so too does your creation in Planet Coaster!
As said, despite faster hardware we still need to find room for streaming audio, this might sound unbelievable but unlike graphics; audio is not hardware accelerated! Audio hardware is pretty much in the pre-graphics-card era and it’s quite amazing all the things we CAN do regardless!
I’d like to be honest with you, as a feature, there’s no one on the team that doesn’t want this in by yesterday. But I have to make choices where we apply our audio resources. On a feature like this, which involves the engine team, gui, gameplay and design we have to be even more careful what we can ask for in terms of support. The biggest hurdle here is that custom audio doesn’t come pre-packaged in our optimised sound banks and as such in a technically, simulation and content sense more complex Coaster game than we made, user music wouldn’t automatically scale.
This game is so incredibly rich in features and content I have to choose between supporting more coasters, guests, composed music etc. (all coming towards release!) and user selectable music. It’s a choice between something which benefits everyone and something that benefits a smaller, though not any less enthusiastic (!) community of builders. I believe more people will benefit from content variation and supporting the amount of current features.
So we definitely see the creative merit in it and we are still investigating the issue. I’s not something we can commit to until we know how to solve these challenges.
