Audio Tweaking (dev branch)

[Sniperwolf572 758]

I remember BI promised to us that with STEAM we will be able to go back to any version of the game.

BI never promised that. The argument was made by the community, that if they wanted to, they could make a branch for each major revision in the same way you now switch between stable and dev. The option is still there, but don't hold your breath that they will do this. Some people already seem to be confused plenty with the two existing branches, let alone if there were 15 of them.

[Tyl3r99 41]

not if there was a simple list in the beta option bit in steam.. for example,

0.50 to 1.10

people could select a main stable branch

[fragmachine 12]

BI never promised that. The argument was made by the community, that if they wanted to, they could make a branch for each major revision in the same way you now switch between stable and dev. The option is still there, but don't hold your breath that they will do this. Some people already seem to be confused plenty with the two existing branches, let alone if there were 15 of them.

Sorry, my bad then. But it indeed would be neat to have this ability - to see how development progressed for instance.

Back on topic - positional audio in A3 should be at least on pair with one in A2: OA. Mods are mods, vanilla is vanilla but with CO playing with JSRS 1.5 I could really tell just by sound - which direction, caliber and estimate distance to the shooter. A3 is the different story though, even sound-modded. While on one side there are improvements, some drawbacks are appearing on the other.

[valnwt 11]

There is a small trick (some probably already know) for those who want to hear distant battles more by using the windows OS loudness-equalization effect. Enable it and turn all the ingame volumes to about 10% (to reduce the effect a bit).

It will make distand battles louder (wont solve it for really distant firefights), you can up the system volume and enjoy hearing all nature sounds when no gunfire is around and not wake up the neighbors when walking on a mine.

It's indeed personal taste, some likes s**t in your pants loud sounding sonic cracks, some dont.

[mikero 79]

from the very first page announcement:

"...ongoing work and so the current state is not considered final (in some places it may be worse for a little while). Effectively the core foundations are in place and now each individual asset needs tuning and fixing"

In RealSpeak what this means is they changed the meaning of the contents of the arrays, and were only able to find time to update a few samples to the new formulas (plural, coz they changed their minds half way thru)

so, instead of simply creating an a3sounds[] array which would respond to these changed parameters, they preferred to break everything currently out there and 'now each individual asset needs tuning and fixing'. read THOUSANDS, coz it ain't going to happen. Nor do we have a formula for converting our existing content to this 'normalised' data.

"Finally, we’ve introduced an improved WSS format. With this change we can drastically reduce the size of the sounds by more than 60 percent ."

If that's gobblespeak for 'normalised' pcm it might be correct, if it's a reference to compression, it's nonsense. There is NO difference in compression to wss. IN FACT they have caused an INCREASE in wss size because they no longer use nibble compression.

"and format WSS finally supports stereo samples"

It always has supported stereo, as has the engine. They chose not to implement it for *most* sounds because their wavtosss convertor threw a hissy fit. 3rd party tools have converted wav to stereo wss since ofp times. There was a gray area in compressed stereo format, and this might be what they mean.

If this is the depth of knowledge of their own sound system, don't hold your breath, because other than the front page blog, we've received no further info.

[ratszo 17]

There is a small trick (some probably already know) for those who want to hear distant battles more by using the windows OS loudness-equalization effect. Enable it and turn all the ingame volumes to about 10% (to reduce the effect a bit).

It will make distand battles louder (wont solve it for really distant firefights), you can up the system volume and enjoy hearing all nature sounds when no gunfire is around and not wake up the neighbors when walking on a mine.

It's indeed personal taste, some likes s**t in your pants loud sounding sonic cracks, some dont.

A trick i'm using is upping bass/cutting treble --much easier to hear the direction of gun fire.

Helps having a graphic 8-band EQ, as with the razer synapse sound driver.

[NeuroFunker 11]

human ear, can't hear sound direction below 250/150hz as i remember, explosions, tank shots etc.

[Bouben 3]

human ear, can't hear sound direction below 250/150hz as i remember, explosions, tank shots etc.

Explosions and tank shots contain full spectrum of frequencies. Not only the bass ones. They contain a lot of mid frequencies that human ear is the most sensitive to and which contain the most information about direction.

The thing why guessing direction of an explosions is difficult is because the sound is so loud that it spreads wide around you and reflects from everything (according to a place's acoustic characteristics in which the explosion happens) - making a lot of echoes that confuse your brain (not your ears). That said, any sound's information about direction can be heavily biased by the environment around you.

However, there definitely are possible situations when explosion's direction can be guessed quite easily and accurately. I just don't have enough real life experience with explosion sounds :-)) but fireworks should come quite close...

Edited January 24, 2014 by Bouben

[SPC.Spets 21]

I don't know if this is the right please to suggest something, but I think is related to the audio. And probably already suggested, sry about that...

Make a slightly sound effect for sounds that comes from the front and sounds that comes from behind.

When an enemy is too close is not very clear where he is shooting from, right or left, front or rear, the sound just cover all the space around :s

[bigpickle 0]

I don't know if this is the right please to suggest something, but I think is related to the audio. And probably already suggested, sry about that...

Make a slightly sound effect for sounds that comes from the front and sounds that comes from behind.

When an enemy is too close is not very clear where he is shooting from, right or left, front or rear, the sound just cover all the space around :s

Sound cone for vehicles is meant to do that but having asked for an explanation from bis since arma 2 about how sound cones work and getting no reply leads me to believe they don't know, perhaps the guy who created it left.

--------------------------------------------------

Also found another bug, the radio sounds are not working like beeps and transmit etc etc

Edited January 30, 2014 by Bigpickle

[doveman 7]

I was just playing the first mission of Adapt with the dev build and I found that the vehicles sounded far too close, like they were literally right next to me when in fact they were maybe 100m away driving along a road, whilst I was hiding in bushes on top of a hill.

So hopefully this can be improved so that players aren't terrified to peek out from their hiding places because it sounds like a vehicle is driving 10ft away from them.

[NeuroFunker 11]

no doubt, there should be improvements, objects blocking sounds, more realistic sound disance culling. Reverberation/echoing, better 3D space audio etc. The sound samples for my taste, are lot better compared to arma 2 ones, but they are far from close to real.

[Brisse 78]

The sound samples for my taste, are lot better compared to arma 2 ones, but they are far from close to real.

Sadly, they are a bit too inconsistent for my taste. Some are good while others are bad, and it's way to easy to distinguish weapon types for example.

[NeuroFunker 11]

actually in arma 2 it was to easy, in arma 3, some weapons sound really close.

[Brisse 78]

actually in arma 2 it was to easy, in arma 3, some weapons sound really close.

Both games make it to easy IMO. JSRS2.0 does pretty well in that regard. Especially the pistols are much better in JSRS2.0.

In vanilla Arma3, try to fire the 4-five and then the ACP-C2. Consider that they fire the same caliber. Those sound samples are so silly it's funny! :)

But, yea. I like some of the sound samples in vanilla Arma3.

Edited February 1, 2014 by Brisse

[griffz 1]

JSRS2 for arma3 completly solve this weird sound feeling. i now "point" my target. And the distant sound are really really great

[bigpickle 0]

I think discussion of mods solving problems shouldn't be happening in this thread unless a bug is specifically related into the original audio engine and its effecting the mod in question.

The reason I'm saying this is because a mod is not a solution its a choice and the original problem remains unfixed for everybody else.

[NeuroFunker 11]

I think discussion of mods solving problems shouldn't be happening in this thread unless a bug is specifically related into the original audio engine and its effecting the mod in question.

The reason I'm saying this is because a mod is not a solution its a choice and the original problem remains unfixed for everybody else.

i agree, we were speaking of "temporary solutions" so to say, ofcourse not the mods should improve things, when the game has broken/not working features.

[Brisse 78]

I think discussion of mods solving problems shouldn't be happening in this thread unless a bug is specifically related into the original audio engine and its effecting the mod in question.

The reason I'm saying this is because a mod is not a solution its a choice and the original problem remains unfixed for everybody else.

That is 100% right and the only reason I mentioned a mod was to point out how it should have been done in vanilla from the start.

[bigpickle 0]

That is 100% right and the only reason I mentioned a mod was to point out how it should have been done in vanilla from the start.

makes sense yeah. When are we getting some kind of response for Devs about the lack of fixes being put into the audio engine. Silence is not the way forward.

[MavericK96 0]

I doubt all the issues have been actually fixed by JSRS, either, since Lord Jarhead himself said that it was an engine issue (with sound directionality and whatnot) and he couldn't do anything about it.

[Brisse 78]

I doubt all the issues have been actually fixed by JSRS, either, since Lord Jarhead himself said that it was an engine issue (with sound directionality and whatnot) and he couldn't do anything about it.

I was just mentioning a particular issue. Nothing was said about JSRS fixing everything.

[griffz 1]

I think discussion of mods solving problems shouldn't be happening in this thread unless a bug is specifically related into the original audio engine and its effecting the mod in question.

The reason I'm saying this is because a mod is not a solution its a choice and the original problem remains unfixed for everybody else.

i must admit i totally agree with you. i was giving hint for players.

---------- Post added at 17:11 ---------- Previous post was at 17:09 ----------

I doubt all the issues have been actually fixed by JSRS, either, since Lord Jarhead himself said that it was an engine issue (with sound directionality and whatnot) and he couldn't do anything about it.

the problem i think JSRS2 solve is the feeling of distance. 100 meter away firearm shooting will not sound close.

[twisted 127]

i must just say here that the sound system is very frustrating now in that i cannot tell where an enemy is absed on their shot sounds. It really really makes playing less enjoyable. I'd really ask BIS to make sorting the 3d soundscape a prioirty. please.

[MavericK96 0]

I was just mentioning a particular issue. Nothing was said about JSRS fixing everything.

My comment wasn't really directed at you specifically, just at the mention of mods fixing game/engine problems.

the problem i think JSRS2 solve is the feeling of distance. 100 meter away firearm shooting will not sound close.

Actually, in the latest version it seems LJ has managed to isolate the directionality issue and help alleviate the problem to a great degree. So I guess maybe it's not an engine problem so much as a vanilla ArmA 3 sound config problem? Because it occurs with vanilla sounds, too.