Adding sound (in any way, shape or form) is one of the most importing things for this game. Visually PC seems to be covered, But adding sounds to themes or rides creates a very unique atmosphere for the park!
Yes totally - custom music. I keep meaning to do it in RCT 3 but keep forgetting.
going to get a copy of the Smiler music from Alton Towers (great ride) - I drove everyone nuts dancing to this in the queue - was great https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpAKsWssXpA
would be fantastic if we could hear from the developers during the Q&A tomorrow (Sunday) at Gamescon about this. As mentioned, in RCT3 the use of using our own music created cool sounds around themed areas and I've always remembered the songs from theme parks I've been too!
Listen to us, Planet Coaster. This is one of -the- absolute most important features, and it is a must.
The amount of immersion that can be added by being able to sync a proper soundtrack to a ride is huge, as evidenced by some of the roller coaster videos people have made in PC and synced music to (externally).
Regarding piracy concerns with the sharing system, it's simple. Don't allow sharing of custom music! Just a warning that says the ride originally had it.
There is no good reason NOT to put this in, and I expect to see it in the final game.
Right now im putting my money on the "unofficial" way
I dont know if they did it on purpose but the even hinted a bit about it. (or im reading too much into it)
WWise is a pretty powerful middleware that some game engines use for sound design and development. Elite Dangerous comes to mind as a game that - using WWise via the Cobra Engine - has absolutely incredible sound design.
Before moving to the Planet Coaster project, Matthew Florianz was part of the ED sound development team. His work with ambiance in that game is legendary [1][2], so I would put a LOT of weight on whatever he says (especially since he - in my experience - tends to be very clear and comprehensive in all his communications).
Did you read what the developer said? They don't know themselves. They want to do it, but could not commit (at the point that the answer was made).
I don't really think that there is anyone around that would NOT want custom music for the game. Frontier included. Whether, when or in what form it will come though, is another issue altogether.
That sounds like a shortcoming in this WWise library. They should really look into working together with the developers of that library to add in this functionality.
It's kinda hard for me to believe, tbh, that any modern audio library can't handle the standard audio formats, either directly or otherwise.
Here is one more time the exact statement/explanation about custom music :
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.
If my interpretation is correct, it seems like their sound system WWise is using a format that is not very common to general use (it can't handle .mp3 or .wav and things like that)
For this reason it's not easy to have custom music because all music needs convertion then, which is not an easy thing to do in-game. Hopefully they still find a way tough...
What i find more interesting and hopefull is this little piece :
"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."
I hope this means, if we go download Wwise, install it, follow a tutorial we WILL be able to have custom music.
UGC is pretty much confirmed i believe, i really hope we can also make our own SFX items (waterjets, smoke, fire, etc) since those also carry sounds effects.
Hopefully we can install WWise, and convert our music into the proper format and then insert it into a self created SFX file.
We won't be able to select a song/theme ingame then, but we just might be able to create a lot of different SFX items, each carrying their own piece of music. The SFX object would become a loudspeaker so to say.
Once again, this is all just wishfull thinking... i hope custom music will be a feature in this game, but if it's not, i really hope there will be a workaround like i described above.
Any news about custom music? For me it is essential to create my Park. The feature was available in RCT, I can't believe it will not be available in the final game.
Any news about custom music? For me it is essential to create my Park. The feature was available in RCT, I can't believe it will not be available in the final game.
