Hi everyone,
We have seen a few threads about coaster audio with comments ranging from Rage sounding like it's falling apart to excessive "clicking".
As you may have read on the Spooky DLC release notes, we did a pass on coasters. Our goal was to make them more responsive to your tracks and with all permutations allowed, you can imagine there could be some unintended side-effects that we missed. We assume this is the case but need to hear it ourselves. There's a tldr; below ; - )
Some background on the changes:
Our goal on the coaster pass was to make coasters more responsive to your tracks. We felt the amount of "reflection" of the walls, the sense of speed and and the mix of mechanical elements and track sounds had gotten a little dull. Even when you go back just one month and A/B (which I have done a lot) you will find that coasters now sound more exciting and respond much better to track changes. They really roar when they go through a tunnel now and it sounds awesome. Compare the Steel Vengeance video's with the same blueprint now and now it zooms and swooshes while rushing past other track pieces and you can hear it go over hills and around corners much more distinctly, even with your eyes closed.
That was our goal, not to change the sound (which was indeed fine) but to emphasize track and environment changes.
but...
Planet Coaster is a super complex project and for Coasters sounds we had to re-use elements in order to get it all into memory. That's why edge cases happen.
Let me explain a bit:
For Planet Coaster we unfortunately have not been able to do is an entirely bespoke sound design for each individual coaster/track. Planet Coaster was a huge project and we had a fantastic team working on it but it still takes a good 5 to 8 weeks to create and implement a single coaster from scratch. This is why we choose to create a bespoke design for modern, classic, kids and wooden and then augmented those bespoke designs with some manufacturer layers (Arrow Dynamics, Bolliger & Mabillard etc.).
Game development is always a process of having to make choices so a breakdown in major type and then manufacturer meant we could do the work within the time, performance and memory limits. The alternative choice was make them far less reactive to track changes, allowing us more time (and memory) to differentiate more. I think we struck the right balance there and am really proud of how they sound.
The second part of this, is that we needed to implement a sound design that sounds good even if the created coaster is completely unrealistic. This is far harder than it sounds, especially when testing as we can easily miss an edge-test-case which highlights a problem with an implementation. I have a sneaking suspicion this is the reason for sound changes.
Finally, we really wanted to acknowledge "your track" and incorporate all the minute changes in it. To do this we need enough layers for things like pitch, roll, going over flanges etc. One of those layers expresses a loop really well, another can express a bank that isn't correct for the angle and yet another can express the feeling of weightlessness going down a steep hill. It adds up and as such we need a minimum amount of layers to represent hills, banks, turns and loops. That's the balance there, less layers allows more distinct audio per coaster, but less representative of the track. So we end up sharing layers, and that can have some unintended effects.
tldr:
Over time coasters got refined and changes have been made to variables such as friction and weight. This means that an implementation we did a long time ago (reliant on getting real time friction and weight information) no longer sounds the way it did when we first implemented it. For some coasters, this resulted in a "dull" or unresponsive sound.
Part of our coaster pass has been to make the coasters again more reactive to track changes. The pass didn't intend to make coasters sound wildly different.
Wherever you find that's the case we'd like to get some example blueprints or parks. We have a suspicion that problems reported are unintended side-effects of being able to build coasters exactly to your own spec, which we missed on our test cycles. So we'd like to hear the problems on our machines and try to figure out if the change is intended or indeed a bug.
Could you please upload a problematic blueprint to Steam and reply in this thread with a link to it?
For starters we need one good example. It's helpful to explain what/where you hear things going wrong.
Thanks!
Matthew
We have seen a few threads about coaster audio with comments ranging from Rage sounding like it's falling apart to excessive "clicking".
As you may have read on the Spooky DLC release notes, we did a pass on coasters. Our goal was to make them more responsive to your tracks and with all permutations allowed, you can imagine there could be some unintended side-effects that we missed. We assume this is the case but need to hear it ourselves. There's a tldr; below ; - )
Some background on the changes:
Our goal on the coaster pass was to make coasters more responsive to your tracks. We felt the amount of "reflection" of the walls, the sense of speed and and the mix of mechanical elements and track sounds had gotten a little dull. Even when you go back just one month and A/B (which I have done a lot) you will find that coasters now sound more exciting and respond much better to track changes. They really roar when they go through a tunnel now and it sounds awesome. Compare the Steel Vengeance video's with the same blueprint now and now it zooms and swooshes while rushing past other track pieces and you can hear it go over hills and around corners much more distinctly, even with your eyes closed.
That was our goal, not to change the sound (which was indeed fine) but to emphasize track and environment changes.
but...
Planet Coaster is a super complex project and for Coasters sounds we had to re-use elements in order to get it all into memory. That's why edge cases happen.
Let me explain a bit:
For Planet Coaster we unfortunately have not been able to do is an entirely bespoke sound design for each individual coaster/track. Planet Coaster was a huge project and we had a fantastic team working on it but it still takes a good 5 to 8 weeks to create and implement a single coaster from scratch. This is why we choose to create a bespoke design for modern, classic, kids and wooden and then augmented those bespoke designs with some manufacturer layers (Arrow Dynamics, Bolliger & Mabillard etc.).
Game development is always a process of having to make choices so a breakdown in major type and then manufacturer meant we could do the work within the time, performance and memory limits. The alternative choice was make them far less reactive to track changes, allowing us more time (and memory) to differentiate more. I think we struck the right balance there and am really proud of how they sound.
The second part of this, is that we needed to implement a sound design that sounds good even if the created coaster is completely unrealistic. This is far harder than it sounds, especially when testing as we can easily miss an edge-test-case which highlights a problem with an implementation. I have a sneaking suspicion this is the reason for sound changes.
Finally, we really wanted to acknowledge "your track" and incorporate all the minute changes in it. To do this we need enough layers for things like pitch, roll, going over flanges etc. One of those layers expresses a loop really well, another can express a bank that isn't correct for the angle and yet another can express the feeling of weightlessness going down a steep hill. It adds up and as such we need a minimum amount of layers to represent hills, banks, turns and loops. That's the balance there, less layers allows more distinct audio per coaster, but less representative of the track. So we end up sharing layers, and that can have some unintended effects.
tldr:
Over time coasters got refined and changes have been made to variables such as friction and weight. This means that an implementation we did a long time ago (reliant on getting real time friction and weight information) no longer sounds the way it did when we first implemented it. For some coasters, this resulted in a "dull" or unresponsive sound.
Part of our coaster pass has been to make the coasters again more reactive to track changes. The pass didn't intend to make coasters sound wildly different.
Wherever you find that's the case we'd like to get some example blueprints or parks. We have a suspicion that problems reported are unintended side-effects of being able to build coasters exactly to your own spec, which we missed on our test cycles. So we'd like to hear the problems on our machines and try to figure out if the change is intended or indeed a bug.
Could you please upload a problematic blueprint to Steam and reply in this thread with a link to it?
For starters we need one good example. It's helpful to explain what/where you hear things going wrong.
Thanks!
Matthew
