megagoth1702

Jesus bratwurste. Your posts spread too much wrong information which is the most offending thing to me because people already barely understand how audio works. Please, research your topics, provide sources for your claims or STFU, seriously. Let me clean this up. Your first sentence makes no sense. Creating SFX from multiple sources? What does that mean? Positional & directional is the same thing mostly. The sound engine decides how much audio is sent to left/right speaker at what volume. EAX added things such as complex environmental simulations and high quality processing for each voice (lowering high frequencies to simulate attenuation of sound behind a wall for example) but positional audio was possible before. So dont be like "EAX = best positional audio ev00r" please. Your second sentence: Saying that Xaudio2 "killed2" EAX is completely and utterly wrong. There were may more factors involved. One major factor was the complete re-write of the audio system for Windows from Vista upwards that resulted in great things such as: -compatible hardware works out of the box, without having to install a driver from the manufacturer (plug n play is always awesome) -much more stable, before this audio drivers were a major cause for Windows instability -a volume slider for each application and more but basically - it's the way of the future. XAudio2 is NOT "the xbos sound API". XAudio was used for the Xbox 360, XAudio2 is an improvement over that. I won't go into details but again you provide false information. Also CPUs became really really powerful over time. Back in the day of hardware audio cards the most common setups were single core CPUs, 3Ghz was TOP SHELF. That's nothing compared to today's quad core gaming setups running at 4GHz. You don't need dedicated audio hardware anymore to calculate effects, all you need now is a DAC (digital to analog converter), the rest really happens in the CPU these days. Look at recent Battlefield games. All CPU processed audio. So. We don't need sound cards anymore (EAX was a big selling point for those gamer cards). CPUs are more powerful than ever and can do all the sound work. Software companies shifted towards CPU audio and do it very well (Battlefield games). No reason for EAX to stick around. Dedicated sound cards are only needed if you want good ADCs/DACs, a linear frequency response and high signal to noise ratio and other stuff. Another useless block of wrong information. Yes, good sound effects done through XAudio2 will sound good on any sound card, you don't need to buy your SoundBlaster X-Fi anymore just to enjoy calculated environmental reverb. But the API was not made for consoles (only). A bit of google & wikpedia would help you figure that out yourself. It's a common thing for big companies these days to unify their production setups. DICE produces games with the Frostbite engine which run on PC, consoles, mobile devices at the same time. Do you have any idea how different these are at low level, what file formats they accept, what sample rates, bit rates etc. ? The same goes for FMOD, WWISE, XAudio 2. These make sure that the audio you want will run on all supported systems. This is a good thing. "still without complex effects" - like what? You always throw around fancy words but never really explain in detail what you mean there. If you want to position a sound in a scene you must alter the frequency content of the sound using EQ (which is simple), play with the volume relative to volume of "close" sounds and if you're really fancy you can even do HRTF stuff which even for example calculates how many miliseconds later a sound arrives at the left ear compared to the right ear. You can do all these things using xaudio2 as your low level API. You can program your own effects in xaudio2, you can basically build your own FMOD/WWISE/audio middleware using XAudio2 as your low level API. Read about it, please. Reverbation in arma3? There is NO reverb in arma 3 at this time. Stop spreading misinformation. It can't? Prove it. The current state of the audio is nowhere near final. I would not have released it like this but this was a complicated decision to make and I am glad I did not have to make it. What developers need to do is to learn how to program audio properly, which is a REALLY FRIGGIN complicated task, which is why they choose to use middleware like FMOD/WWISE. But do you know how much these cost per project? Look it up. Bohemia has a way of building their own tools to stay clear of third party dependance. This is why they chose to develop their own audio engine/middleware. Some day we will even get an audio editor, I am sure of it but it will not be within the next years. Look how long it took to get a 3D mission editor. I have not played americas army but I believe you if you say the audio was worse after their switch to XAudio2. But that's not the only reason. You say the sound was "random effects" which means its the audio CONTENT that was bad, not the underlying audio architecture. You need to always treat these two separately. Battlefield Hardline uses the same audio engine as Battlefield 4 yet I still feel like the sound in Battlefield 4 is superior due to better audio content. Do you like using sound mods? Do you feel like JSRS/DynaSound/Another Sound Mod is superior to what Bohemia is producing? Well, they all use the same underlying sound engine so you see these two are separate issues. XAudio2 is just another API and they all do the same. If it sounds bad, they have not used it right and/or fed it the wrong sound content. Arma3 uses Nvidia Physx, does the game feel better now? In some cases, yes, in some cases absolutely no - the tank behaviour is horrible and driving does not feel realistic to me. So these "if you use brand X together with brand Y and if youre hire person Z all your problems will go away" statements are just wrong. Please correct me if I'm wrong but Unity uses a stripped down version of FMOD, it's not the full one and there are licencing fees if you want to do big projects. I am not sure on that though. Anyway XAudio2, FMOD, WWISE, they all can do the same thing, although XAudio2 is the bare-bone low level stuff and you have to code your features yourself while the other products are more or less "editors for implementing audio". You have people claiming that ProTools is the best DAW out there. Then you have Cubase people,REAPER people, Sequoia, Garage Band, Samplitude, Bitwig, Ableton you name it. All DAWs are really the same, if you really want you can get the same result out of them sound wise. What they differ in is the workflow. So for the love of god man, stop posting wrong information, research, have patience and if you really can't take it, go play a different game. I am also pissed that arma 3 does not sound as I want it to sound and that the sound engine is broken partially, sounds are cutting out etc. This is unacceptable but I know that the audio team is working their ass off to improve these things. They work really, really, really, really, really hard. You have no idea how hard. So yeah. Please. No more XAudio2 bashing unless you can BACK IT UP with data, facts and proper explanation. EDIT: Really bro? ONE PROGRAMMER spends nearly a whole year to program an engine that is better than anything we had before for 15 years and it's BOHEMIAS ENGINE meaning NO royalty fees to FMOD/WWISE/whathaveyou, instant bug fixes etc. It's just good to have in-house tools. And you suggest they throw it all away and just "buy a new one"? What a stupid statement. "Buy X and you will be happy". Like 1 cent? Really? Here you go: http://www.fmod.org/sales/ Please provide me a calculation proving that if for each unit of arma 3 apex expansion we would pay 1 cent for an audio middleware it would be enough. I doubt that. Remember, they have to pay for every project they make... So it's not worth it in the long run. I don't think that every piece of information in this post is 100% on point, so please feel free to correct me (and provide sources/data so I can check facts). But still this is 200% better than the nonsense being spread by other people.

Yep. forest, meadows, trees, sea and interior are environmental variables (called controllers by the BIS guys) that go from 0 to 1 depending on where you are on the map. The forest value does not jump quickly from 0 to 1 as soon as you enter a forest, rather it detects you being close to a forest and scales the value up until you are "in". Unfortunately I do not know of a way to display these values in real time so I always end up testing. Interior controller becomes 1 when there is a surface texture called "int_X" below the player. Good: You can have different sounds at different volmes. Bad: I can not see a way to guarantee a final value of "1". So if you are in an environment where meadows and forest are both at 0.5 it means both sounds are played at -6dB gain but if you combine them they together do not produce the same level as a single tail played at 0db gain. I am pretty sure you can use these expressions in any soundShader.

Hey, sorry for not being there for a while because ... Stuff. :) Alright. Finally took a look at your config. Let's try things. I see volume/gain values like 40, 60 and I get the thought that the person doing this has no idea what he is actually doing in an attempt to get the sound louder so some basics first, no offense. :) Just making sure. The first value after the sound path is the sound GAIN. It's a multiplier for the sound's samples, simple as that. What's not so simple is that the value can be given in dB values or plain numbers. Both are not the same! volume = 2; is not the same as volume = db+2. To calculate these values I used to use this website. But since Arma3 supports dB values natively in mostly all places (except for soundShaders in Eden update, but it works in DEV Branch) I don't bother calculating anymore because any sane person that works with audio prefers dB anyway. volume = db6 is the same as volume = db+6. If you want something quieter, use db-X. db0 means 0dBFS, play the sound's samples at the same gain as it is in the sound file. In the digital world of audio - Arma's db0 is 0dB FULL SCALE (dBFS) which is the LOUDEST signal a digital system can produce, all values are 1111111111111111, hard clipping, distortion, destruction. Bad. This means that if we push the gain of our sounds further than db0 (by using values like db+6 for example) we are "ramming" it against the ceiling for louder, but distorted sound. Luckily in Arma3 there is a so called "limiter" that, if it detects sounds that go over 0dBFS, LOWERS the OVERALL output gain that goes to the speakers so that distortion is kept to a minimum. This has a side effect of all other sounds becoming quieter except for the loudest sound in the scene. This might be desirable in some scenarios BUT limiters are compicated devices and many limiters have different ways of working. We don't know exactly how Arma 3's limiter works (attack, release times etc.) so I suggest staying clear of it by using the exact same values that Bohemia Interactive uses in their configs as a maximum reference unless you exactly know what you're doing. They already push it a bit with values like 1.77 (+5dB) but it's not as big of an issue as a value of 60 (600% = db+15). +6dB is TWICE the gain so you can imagine that dB+15 is quite a jump. Okay. :) The major culprit here are the curves for the distance filter (muffles sound over distance) and the volume drop off (makes sound quieter over distance). The curves are too steep for general gameplay which is why people will tend to "boost" their volume values which results in crazy loud sounds at close distance. If you are "just" doing small modifications not based on sound (for example weapons, vehicles etc) I would not touch the filter curve. But if you absolutely have to, copy Laxe's values into your vehicles config: class cfgDistanceFilters { class DS_defaultDistanceFilter { type = "lowPassFilter"; minCutoffFrequency = 150; qFactor = 1; innerRange = 400; range = 2600; powerFactor = 32; }; }; class cfgSoundGlobals { defaultDistanceFilter = "DS_defaultDistanceFilter"; }; Don't copy it into the class cfgVehicles block, put it "outside" if you know what I mean... All configurations within arma happen inside "class cfgXXXX" blocks. The code above belongs OUTSIDE of these. But what you can and SHOULD tweak are the distance values of your sounds. Since the curve that modifies the volume dropoff over distance is SCALED based on your distance values, you should be able to get better results by multiplying your distance values 2x and go on from there. A value of 500 is waaay to small, since the volume drop off curve is very steep. So yeah, get your volume values back to normal levels (!!!! no offense but I really don't like to see sounds being smashed against the limiter like that :P), extend distance a LOT and see what happens, if you absolutely have to, use Laxemann's code from above. And report back with your results! :)

If you are playing singleplayer, can you provide the mission file? It would also be very nice to see the situation in a video. The closer we can get to reproducing the issue the faster we can solve it. A system that dynamically manages hundreds of sounds is complicated to set up. A simple "first in first out" system would not always work. For example the "oldest" sound in a scene might be an environmental sound like rain, you would not want to kill that sound for a footstep for example. I don't know how the system works right now but I will look into it, this bugs me as well now. :D Although I have to say that I tested the marksman weapons (MGs) on dev branch today and the sounds did not get cut off like in the RC release.

Known issue, very hard to track down. Working on it. SoS for vehicles has not yet been touched so I would not expect it to work right now.

This issue is fkng annoying. It's some very low level stuff going on there and . It has nothing to do with 3Dprocessors because even if you use sound3DProcessor = none; (which makes the game handle the audio like in the old engine, mono downmix etc) the thing breaks. It's the mixing of the soundSet that is breaking stuff. Audio guys at Bohemia also don't know what's going on, we are going to look into it further on monday. Jesus, screw this. I'm off to bed.

Post your config! Lax already explained the rest about the filters. You can build your own. Be aware though that you change the audio system for the whole game this way. It would be nice to just be able to add a custom distanceFreqAttenuationFilter to a specific vehicle but I am not sure this is possible at the moment. For experimentation's sake: try lowering the powerFactor value, default is 2, try that. Low/High pass filters:

Well yes, that's the whole point! But old configs will still work because Bohemia wants backwards compatibility. The new sound stuff is not yet implemented for vehicles. Currently new configuration only really works for weapons and explosions. Okay. Seems like a setup issue. If you still get the errors after a reinstall, I believe it's time to go into Mikero's thread and ask there. https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/113852-mikeros-dos-tools/

PboProject usually only has problems when the setup is incorrect (no arma3 tools installed from steam and ran at least once for example). Are you getting the error when you are opening pboProject or when you are trying to pack something? Try re-installing the tools from this package: http://bit.ly/1ZkW0LC

Since the issue has not yet been reported on the issue tracker - as soon as I get the mission file from your test I'll report the issue. This is pretty bad and needs to be looked at. Good find! We are going to have to wait for vehicles. There are technical problems like: "How do you make speed of sound for looped sounds work flawlessly in every situation?". These will be tackled as soon as the basic features of the new sound engine REALLY work reliably, which they do NOT at this time so our best bet is - patience, as usual. :) There is only so much one audio programmer can do. Well, good to read that you are finally more happy. ;)

Hello guys, I want to be able to do this: I need to encode WAV files to WSS. Currently I use Mikero's DeWss GUI to do this one by one, there must be a more efficient way! I did write a batch script once but it is always local to the folder I specify in the script. When I select multiple files and use the "send to menu" to WAVtoWSS it only encodes ONE file, not the many that I selected. I want to have something that: -encodes the files sent to it -looks for wav files in the folder I send it and encodes them into the same folder (usual behaviour for these tools). Unfortunately I have no idea how to write batch scripts, the one I wrote was a hit & miss mostly until suddenly it worked. So yeah, can you guys help me out here? Thanks!

Guys, back on topic of audio please.

I don't use wavToWss anymore, I use Mikero's tools DeWss.

You don't need camPos*1. camPos IS 1 in 3rd person and 0 in 1st person. With the other values the sound designer is multiplying the volume by 2/3/4, increasing it.

Yes. These are all parts of volume expressions. Expressions are used because the volume (or other parameters) need to change depending on controllers (WIKI page is WIP, I just created it) such as speed, GmeterZ etc. These values are dynamic and change with gameplay events. For example the controller rotorSpeed becomes a bigger number as the speed of the rotors increases. This can be used to increase volume (and frequency) of a rotor sound. The expressions are math. Values are added and multiplied and the final value is the volume gain of the sound. If something is multiplied by 0 the result is 0 so the sound is silent. So if the engine of a vehicle is disabled the engineOn controller is 0, everything multiplied with that controller is also 0 so it makes sense to use that controller with samples of engines which are silent when the engines are off. This makes sense? camPos is 1 when you use the 3rd person mode and is connected to the camera/listener in the 3D world. It's used for distance calculations between you and the sound source (and I am sure many other things too). So if you want to make sure that something is only played when the FPS camera is used you use (1-camPos). Think about it. There is an internal sound. You switch the camera to 3rd person and the expression 1-camPos becomes 0. All sounds with that expression go silent. Phew. It's late but I hope you understand better now?

Nice test setup and great post mate. :) Gotta say, I really really like the speed of sound simulation for bullet cracks.

Well you asked if the sound engine with "everything" is coming out. :P That I do not know. I am not really up to date on what gets released when. I just kinda do my thing, heh. On a side note. More Wiki info. https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/cfgSound3DProcessors

I don't know when the new sound engine will go from dev-branch to public. And yes, sound really adds to the immersion. :)

Patience. :) Arma is finally getting a sound engine after nearly 15 years... This is HUGE. The basics of the old sound engine were planted when I was 9 years old. Let's give the devs more time, vehicles are going to get an overhaul for sure some day. We must understand that right now the very low end basics of the engine are layed down (stereo playback, universal configuration system) and after that is done it can be used in more complex systems. I know it's awesome to be excited about "your own" project and it sucks that you can't do everything you want because of the engine but you guys are doing awesome work with these jets already! They really sound cool! I am no jet guy but to me at least they really sound cool. :) I also strongly believe that no matter how cool and awesome all this nerdy config stuff is - in the end it comes down to using great source material. Elite:Dangerous has one of the most amazing sound designs yet it would not sound as cool without the crazy-interesting source material that is being fed into the engine. Even the old arma sound engine can sound really really good with good sounds. :)

New config is only used for shots and explosions right now. Vehicles are not yet using new configuration.

Thanks for the ticket. Issue is known. In final version after player releases the "fire" button the sound will skip to the end of the loop. :)

The tails are all actually pretty long. Your standard tail. 3-5 seconds. Mostly they are very quiet compared to the shot though. But all tails are unique, which means if played all together some stand out more than others because of their sonic character. I believe this to be the most significant point here. Also the volume values and curves & distances applied to the guns are not final at all so as with everything in arma (and especially with sound), gotta stay patient. :)

What worries me a bit more is that the cannon distant sound has no bass in it at all. Sounds like woodsticks being hit together. There needs to be so much more bass there... I always have to think of this video. It's the high frequencies that get killed over distance, low frequencies survive pretty well. Dat bass.

Hey guys, not sure if there is a thread for this - if there is, this one will die quickly so it's fine I guess. (Sorry, I'm really sick, it's late and my brain barely works, I apologize if this has brought up already.) -place group of units on steep hill so that units are placed on different heights -copy units -paste units on some flat area -> units that were higher in the original formation will now be higher as well, in some cases starting the game will kill them because of the drop In the old 2D editor this was impossible and I find myself micro-managing such "simple" copy & paste jobs. I love Eden but I am not too familiar with it. Is there some option I am missing?

Created a ticket. http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=27757