LIRR Commuter: New York - Long Beach, Hempstead & Hicksville

This was a really fun route to work on, having so many different branches and areas to explore. I was able to do so much cool stuff.

What have I done?

Complete environmental audio overhaul of all original LIRR tiles
Environmental ambience for the entire route extension
Collectible sounds
Mastery tile audio
Cool new detail sounds!

Off the top of my head, here's some of my favourite things that I made for the route:

First, here's some ambience from Long Beach:

Water tower wind creak:

I thought it would be a pretty neat detail to have water towers creak & groan in strong wind. If the wind's greater than a value of 0.5, the towers will creak and groan every few minutes

Woodhaven station:

The art team did a great job creating the abandoned Woodhaven station that can be found on the Atlantic terminal branch of the route.

I created a lot of new ambient sounds for this area as I wanted to try and make it sound as creepy as possible!

I created a special ambience for Woodhaven that fades in as you approach the station, it's a lot of eerie muffled noise with some occasional distant bangs and scrapes, spooky!

I created a pipe noise spline which allowed me to place the sound of water flowing through pipes and make it follow the pipe so the sound always appears to originate from the pipe as you walk alongside it.

I added some wall crumble sounds that play every now and then over the various piles of rubble around the station.

I created a water dripping blueprint which plays water dripping noise, this actually reads the route's weather data and you'll find that if you visit it during or shortly after rain, it'll be dripping more. (I ended up using this at Penn station aswell)

This Fire (Scenario):

I just had to implement some audio into this scenario. A rail-side fire?? That just needed some sounds added.

If you're brave enough to check out the fire, you'll hear the building's fire alarm going off, the engines of the fire engines that are putting out the fire and of course, the fire itself. I designed some really big sounding fire sounds for this, as well as adding in the sound of the water from the hoses hitting the roof, the roof buckling from the heat and the occasional sound of debris falling inside the building.

Electrical cabinet (Collectible):

The smartest collectible I've worked on so far! This actually required me to program in some logic to make the sounds play how I wanted.

In its uncollected state, the electrical cabinet plays an intermittent beep sound alongside a blinking light. When you 'collect' it, you hear the collect sound I made & then you hear it powerup and start working again.

I had a lot of fun making it as I usually only add sounds for when collectibles are picked up, but I knew this one just needed to have sounds. I also think it helps to bring in the players' attention as the beep will hopefully indicate that it's something 'important', it's then pretty satisfying to get it up and running again.

Mastery tile:

A small one, but I still added some nice little details to it. Even some what of an easter egg if you look at the laptop to see what they're watching.

Fun fact, The art team had added the image of an old Train Sim World livestream to the laptop and I went out of my way to track down the orignal stream aswell as the timecode to play the correct audio for that area. One of those things that doesn't matter in the slightest, But I knew would drive me mad if I didn't do it anyway.