Live Forum Q&A - Audio!

Haven't seen this answered yet so I'll repost it.

Will we have the ability to import custom music (MP3, MP4, .wav formats) into specific rides and/or loudspeakers in the game (such as a PA system)?
 
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we hired a really famous game audio recordist called Watson Wu who went to a theme park in the Usa for us and recorded loads of rides there. One launch coaster was so intense it knocked one of his recorders right out!

May I so kindly ask which park this was? I would like to take a wild guess that the one ride was Kingda Ka at Six Flags Great Adventure?
 

Matthew Florianz

Senior Audio Designer- Elite: Dangerous
Frontier
what has been the hardest sound to create so far in this game?


Hi BloodyKimbel!

Thanks for being here and interesting question.

Many of the sounds we create are not just about finding the right sample, or creating the right kind of sounds from combining layers. These days it is actually equally as much work to make them behave properly. For instance, getting the crowds right when there are so many of them was a huge challenge when we started: we couldn't just place a sound on every person in the park as there where just too many of them!

So it's a combination of interesting challenges: Getting the coasters right was difficult (took five weeks!). Getting the Planco (our unique language spoken in the parks) sounding right took a lot of direction and iteration (we really just started on that). Lots of little details, like making sure the trees and the wind are in sync have taken time. Gui sounds are difficult too, because you hear them all the time and we really wanted a sonic identity that is uniquely Planet Coaster.

So all of us sound designers struggled with one thing or another.

For me I have gone back and forth the most on the select sound. That may sound less impressive than coasters but there's so much going on when you hear it. For one, it's probably the sound you have heard the most while playing the game, so it can risk becoming repetitive. Second, the way audio works there's always a little bit of a delay between an input and hearing the associated sound and then the game being able to display the results. A select sound needs to not only bridge that gap, it also needs to sound snappy but not to snappy or it's out of sync : )

It's finding that balance where we can spend a lot of time on something seemingly very simple. But that also makes our jobs so much fun!
 

Matthew Florianz

Senior Audio Designer- Elite: Dangerous
Frontier
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.
 
+1 for the already mentioned placeable speakers, on ride soundtrack & triggered sounds.

Can you also please implement the complete silence when a ride crashes? - I loved that in the older RCT1/2 games - so ominous and eerie!
 

Jashby

Frontier
Frontier
Hi Guys, a few questions from me......

1. As with lots of others, speakers around the park and in queue lines which are editable with types of sounds would be great.

2. Re the above, can we differentiate between 'Music' and 'Sounds' as we may want to make more of an ambiance rather than a tune.

3. When in first person mode, will we hear more such has sounds of shops, cooking, cash desks etc, other sounds like, trash cans flip lids and cash dispense machines etc ?

4. Finally, depending on how the actual simulation will work, different sounds for different notifications would be great so that we can tell whether its related to money, staff, ride breakdowns, peeps etc. Really so that perhaps we can tell if it's an urgent attention required or something that could wait whilst finishing something else ?

Thanks and keep up the great work - Looking forward to Alpha 2 - Terrain tools looking great !!

Cheers.
For perfomance reasons there are a bunch of sounds that are really only heard very close like the vendor conversations, crackling on the camp fire and people having conversations. You'll be able to hear those whenever the camera is close to the ground, regardless of how it gets there ;)4.
We've not done a great deal on the GUI yet but this is something I'd love to have as a player, there's nothing worse than your notification for your most profitable ride breaking down being buried under a pile of other less important ones.
Matt's answering the question about ambience as I write this :)
 
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Congratulations to all the Audio team; This game has outstanding sound effects that add a lot of depth into the game and make it so enjoyable to play. Here are my questions:

1- How do you record all the audio that has to do with special effects like bubbles, fire, water, etc.? Also what is your strategy towards fireworks audio?

2- Are there any plans to have soundtrack in coaster cars? This could allow us to build amazing coasters that have onboard audio like Rock 'n' Roller Coaster at Disney.

3- Are we going to have the option to import and play our own music on speakers inside the game like we had in RCT3?

Thank you so much and again congratulations on the amazing audio! You guys are the BEST!!!!
 

Jashby

Frontier
Frontier
Great music and sound effects in this game!

1. Could you tell us more about how a rollercoaster or a flat ride is recorded? Like do you use multiple microphones to record sounds at a close distance and microphones to record ambient noise, any difficulties to record moving rides or roller coasters, any problems with for example wind noise that you need to filter out.

2. How big is the audio team?

3. How much do you work together with the programmers to write or adjust code that is written for the audio part in the Cobra engine? I can imagine you can't just throw 20 layers and a number of infinite sound effects on a coaster or ride, because that will impact the game performance.

4. Could we get custom music that starts when a coaster train starts and uses fade out effect when it arrives back in the station? This combined with an option to use custom music in stations would be awesome. Oh and of course custom music for rides and speakers we can place as scenery pieces (i think someone mentioned this already [tongue])

Some of these are probably a bit to much to answer in a written Q&A, but luckily question 2 is easy to answer with just a number.

Thanks for the feedback! It's really nice to know people like it,
I can't really answer 1 as that's more of a sound design question, but I'll give the others a stab.

  1. We've currently got 6 people on it. 2 audio coders (one graduate[me] and one senior[Ian]) and 4 designers( one senior[James], 2 lead[Matt and Mike] and the big bad head of audio, Jim Croft).
  2. This is literally my entire job :D A lot of the stuff is already done for me by wwise( our audio middleware) and the rest of the cobra engine. Performance is a big concern, often something sounds great but then you look at you computer and the CPU is literally on fire and the smoke makes it hard to carry on working. Managing the number of emitters( sound sources) voices(sound effect playing) and streams(big files open) is key. Often we'll reach a middle ground between what they want (great sound) and what I want (great sound without fires).
  3. Matt's epic above should cover this.
Hope that's enough detail for a written Q&A[noob], I could go on for hours about efficiency, but I would probably just talk everyone to sleep.
 
Will there be billboards with selectable sounds in the game? Or will there be special composed music for special coasters i.e. a scary music or a more sci-fi one? This would be absolutely amazing with billboards ;-) And by the way, sorry for my English, it was a looooong day [big grin]
 
Congratulations to all the Audio team; This game has outstanding sound effects that add a lot of depth into the game and make it so enjoyable to play. Here are my questions:

1- How do you record all the audio that has to do with special effects like bubbles, fire, water, etc.? Also what is your strategy towards fireworks audio?

2- Are there any plans to have soundtrack in coaster cars? This could allow us to build amazing coasters that have onboard audio like Rock 'n' Roller Coaster at Disney.

3- Are we going to have the option to import and play our own music on speakers inside the game like we had in RCT3?

Thank you so much and again congratulations on the amazing audio! You guys are the BEST!!!!
 
Thanks Jon, it's very unlike you to push work to others ; )

Hello Rocket!

Thanks for your question!

We certainly spend time at other theme parks and not only that; we hired a really famous game audio recordist called Watson Wu who went to a theme park in the Usa for us and recorded loads of rides there. The park was closed for two days and he's had a blast riding the different coasters and flat-rides. One launch coaster was so intense it knocked one of his recorders right out! This has given us pristine recordings without any people screaming and it's part of why the coasters sound so amazing.

At the same time, we have been inventive where we could. One day I was riding my bicycle to work (Dutch as I am) and rolled over a drain cover. That sounded exactly like a wheel going over a flange which we'd been trying to record from trains and other sources, and never got quite right.

So after that discovery, we went to our parking lot and spend a few hours riding the bicycle around; to great amusement of the rest of the team looking at us from their windows : )

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Dutchie!!! [up]
 
Hi all,
It's great to be here and have the ability to asks some questions, ^^
here we go,

1. Do you expect to improve the sounds of the peoples screams in coasters? (I know, since the game is not in phase 2 yet, maybe it is normal that there are a few.
2. What about the coasters sound, do all the metalic tracks types will have the same windy sound when they aproach, or do you intend to get each one his specific sound.
3. Will we have the possibility to put some music in our parks? You guys already made a awesome work, and I can't wait to hear some new creation, and it would be lovely to not have music just around the rides and shops, but also in other areas.
4. Here is a special one....."It's so loopy, it trik a bloop...." Or something like that, as I heard a femal guest said that, It make me Laugh, It would be lovely to know How you guys did record peoples discutions, and what is this Famous Language they are using. [big grin]

Keep up the good....Excellent work.
And Thanks For All!
 

Matthew Florianz

Senior Audio Designer- Elite: Dangerous
Frontier
First off, thank you for answering our questions! I would like to know if you guys are planning for ambient sounds? It would be nice to have wind and nature sounds for our rides and gardens. Also will there be place-able speakers for paths and rides in the future?

Hi Crystal Blue!

Ambience's, great idea! We are thinking along similar lines like those really nice placeable VFX you saw on yesterdays Stream with Ed, Dean and Mark. We' are looking at creating placeable speakers for supplied ambience's. Think of a nice pirate bay ambience with ship creaks, waves, bells and seagulls. Or perhaps indeed a beautiful magical forest full of birds.
 
Ambience's, great idea! We are thinking along similar lines like those really nice placeable VFX you saw on yesterdays Stream with Ed, Dean and Mark. We' are looking at creating placeable speakers for supplied ambience's. Think of a nice pirate bay ambience with ship creaks, waves, bells and seagulls. Or perhaps indeed a beautiful magical forest full of birds.

YES! You have to do this!
 
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