[Fury]

Having seen screenshots is not really the same thing as playing it yourself. Graphics have improved quite nicely in the past four years and some of the mods really like to push the engine. Kudos to everyone involved with fs2_open, FSU,  BP and ST:R. (haven't had the time to play more yet)

However, all is not so rosy and I HAVE to ***** about one thing. And that is the sound engine, it sounds like it has not been touched at all and still sounds horrid. I'm hearing impaired and my ears still bleed when I hear any rapid fire weapons firing. It's not just rapid fire weapons either, but turrets close to each other. There was this in-game cutscene in Blue Planet where the camera/player is near a friendly capital ship. The said ship fires these kinky pulse weapons with such speed I truly though the game had crashed and caused an infinite loop. When I realized the sound originated from the turrets, I was even sadder than I would've been had the game crashed. I honestly don't know how you people with normal hearing can stand these sounds.

Could the sound engine get some loving too, please?

Then a minor rant that can be partially overcome with l33t skillz. FS joystick sensitivity controls are still as crappy as ever. My old and trustworthy MS Sidewinder Pro is having hard time hitting targets when piloting the more maneuverable fighters. I very much would like to see sensitivity control slider going even further down than it currently does.

[Dilmah G]

I've never really noticed much about the sound engine...

[portej05]

I thought the sound engine had got some OpenAL lovin' - can you describe what the problem is?

[Fury]

OpenAL only replaced DirectSound as sound API which removed the need for DirectX and allowed cross-platform compatibility. Some new audio file formats are also supported. But as far as I can see, that's about it and the engine is pretty much untouched since original retail.

I tried to describe the main issue with the sound engine in the first post already. For example, the engine does not handle weapon effects all that well if same sound is used on multiple rather rapidly firing turrets or as fighter primary weapon. The sound effect sounds fine in itself, but once played by the engine rapidly it sounds awful.

HerraTohtori also made some very good wishes at our irc channel regarding the sound engine, but he can explain those himself.

[Zacam]

We've actually been paying attention to that. To the extent that Herra made a drool worthy effect for Flak guns, and I have manipulated several effects sounds myself.

However, the engine keeps truncating the sounds (or warping them or anything but playing them to achieve the intended result), even when it is set to the same data rate as an original retail file. We've been hashing this out for a while now and yeah, it is probably going to involve changes in the engine code to do properly.

I do agree though that more than just 16bit 11khz and 8bit 22khz needs to be present. In fact, it seems almost backwards, I'd do 16bit 22khz. And lets not also forget that they are all mono channel wav files.

But now we are verging towards some murky waters. Namely, how far do we go with replacing stuff? Because at some point, we may very well replace everything to such an extent that the original game won't be required any more. How is that going to be handled by the IP Holders? Or will that day be significantly enough in to the future that it will no longer be a concern? (Okay, possibly being able to adequately Voice Act the campaigns might be a little far fetched right now, but the point is still the same, if we get started, where do we stop?)

As much as you complain about the sound (and rightfully so), I complain about the interface. Too much duplicated images and wasted space for something that could be much more elegant.

[takashi]

Uh, yeah, the sounds suck....But the infinite-loop sound effect happens in of games with uber rapid fire guns. And sometimes my computer just crashed an actually got an infinite loop (Freelancer)!

Unless the sounds play OVER eachother in the order they were made, instead of cancelling the last one to make way for a new one. But, that would cause lag with some computers and rapid fire.

[Kolgena]

Hmm. An idea I thought of (but again, since I don't know how to code anything, I wouldn't know how hard this would be to make) is to use two sound files for every repetitive-fire weapon.

The issue seems to arise when the sound byte used is longer than the weapon reload, so you get the annoying phutphutphutphutphutbabababababaaaaam effect from flack and such. I'm thinking that each shot would generate two sounds that over lap: one that's the same length as the shot repeat, and one that's quite a bit longer. The initial "head" of the sound would be concussive sound you get from the shot, and the longer one would be the ensuing growl. To map it out visually, a flak cannon would generate this:

Phoo Phoo Phoo Phoo Phoo
      oooooooooooooooooooooooom

Explosions would be

Baaa Baaa Baaa Baaa Baaa
      aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam

K. I hope we're talking about the same issue here, and I'm already suspecting that this sort of solution will both sound like junk and be hard to do. But anyways, the concept is that the usually cut-off rumble that breaks the current sounds becomes two pieces: a head piece per shot, and a sustained "pedal tone" of growl or whoosh that is being lost now.

[Devils_Hitman]

The sound is as pure from when I first played fs2.

[General Battuta]

The sound is as pure from when I first played fs2.

That's exactly the problem.

[Devils_Hitman]

The sound is as pure from when I first played fs2.

That's exactly the problem.

Maybe your ears are faulty.

[General Battuta]

The sound is as pure from when I first played fs2.

That's exactly the problem.

Maybe your ears are faulty.

That's a really insensitive thing to say in a thread where the original poster is hearing-impaired.

I, however, am not, but the issue here is that the audio engine is not as good as it could be, the faults are evident once you know what to listen for, and we're thinking of ways to improve it.

[Nemesis6]

Might as well join in the fray - My only gripe with the sound engine is the pre-made "whoosh" when ships pass me. Sounds a bit set up and off beat, but this might be a preference kind of thing.

[swashmebuckle]

I've noticed this too; the effects cutting off can definitely be pretty awkward sounding at times.  Would it be possible to make every other instance of the sound play through a different channel or something so that you can get the overlap with the tail end of the preceding shot?  Rotating through a few subtly different samples for the offending weapons could also help a lot with immersion, assuming the problem is related to the machine-gun effect you sometimes get in a music notation program/sequencer when using repeated notes on crappy software instruments

I'd also like to add a sound engine complaint: there seems to be a noticeable gap between battle cues in the soundtracks as the next ogg is loaded up, which effectively torpedoes my Dark Side of the Moon mod

Has anyone figured out a way around this problem or do I just have to cut the tracks off a little before the end to make them segue on tempo?

[chief1983]

Yeah the whole notion of fly by sounds was a hack to get around doing proper engine hums with doppler effect, but it does ensure that you always get a definite whoosh and not some other variant.  It would be nice to see a true engine hum and a doppler effect applied to that, and supposedly there is already some support in the code for that.  Would be nice to see what someone could do with it.

[Nuke]

im gonna have to point at the hardware here. sound in general has actually taken a step back in games for several reasons. the decline of the sound card, because lots of mobos come with sound on them and the availability of sound cards has diminished a lot. and then theres the vista induced death of accelerated sound in the name of drm. sad fact is you get a better signal to noise ratio on old skool pci sound cards than you do with an integrated chipset. furthermore there is little advantage to buying a new card because new cards dont bring any new level of performance over an old card and will still set you back 100-200 bucks. best thing you can do is use a digital line to an av receiver.

freespace used to have really awesome sound back in the eax era. fs just doesnt sound as good as it used to back on a 98 machine with an sblive and eax. its not a fault of open al, its just that theres no standard audio acceleration on modern oses.

also people arent making proper use of the stream flag on rapid fire weapons. stream causes the sount to loop on a single channel instead of playing it again on a new channel. i found this out in nukemod and made some of the gatlings sound better (they still suck though, cause im a horrible sound engineer )

[chief1983]

You don't really need acceleration though, OpenAL Soft can do in software most of what the old SB Live can do, if not more.  And the code to do most of that is still there, we just need to start taking advantage of it.

[Fury]

@ Nuke; Current HD Audio codecs beat the crap out of old PCI audio cards, higher-end HD Audio codecs on on-par with Audigy 2's but of couse can't beat X-Fi. Noise and electrical interference is something that onboard chips are very susceptible to. It is up to the motherboard manufacturer to design their motherboards around the issue and shield the audio codec properly. You can dismiss old AC'97 cocecs, they were crap. If you still have a computer with AC'97 and no PCI sound card, time for a upgrade.

Hardware acceleration on audio is hardly required these days. Multi-core CPUs make sure that you will have plenty of audio processing power behind any sound no matter what game you're playing. And 3D accelerated audio is still possible on Vista and Win7 via OpenAL if audio chip supports hardware acceleration.

For HD Audio codecs there is 3D SoundBack from Realtek (for Realtek chips obviously) and Xear3D EX for C-Media chips that enables surround, spatial and reverberation effects on those HD Audio chips on titles that supports OpenAL. Audio processing is done on CPU however.

[Nuke]

my asus mobo came with a pcix riser card with an nice noise shield over the chipset. its an hd chipset so it sounds pretty good. i have an older pci xfi which is ok, but nothing spectacular. they sound about the same. if the xfi card had the same features as it had under xp32 id use it. under xp64 and vista64 its drivers are crippled. so i just use the hd card i currently have. none the less i dont have the speakers to take advantage of either.

i remember audigy cards as having really ****ty sound compaired to the previous soundblaster live series. the audigy 2 cards were only slightly better. i was also disapointed with my xfi card as well. but sound cards have changed little as far as signal to noise ratios and number of hardware sound chanels. i found sound quality is usually dependant on speakers and wiring rather than the actual sound card. mainly isolate your analog circuits from your digital circuits.

[chief1983]

I've still yet to own an onboard sound solution that didn't pop somewhat in certain titles, and my X-Fi is perfect.  I'll stick with the discrete solution.

[blackhole]

For rapid fire guns it would work better if the volume for the shot effect was rapidly brought down to 0 instead of just cut off. Otherwise you can usually just let the audio blend together in most circumstances because you have oodles and oodles of audio processing power available.