[Kolgena]

Alright, so I'm in the middle of my first retail FS2 playthrough since quite a few months. I've recently gotten to the mission where you go into stormy nebula (like the one where you escort the TAG missiles and the lucidity), and the new sound code really, really hates those missions. The thunder sound seems to play nonstop and with many instances overlapping each other. The net result? Really really loud nonstop thunder that takes priority over other sounds. Sound effects such as lasers and explosions don't play because there are already too many sounds going on at once.

Is there a way that to fix this?

[mjn.mixael]

This is a great question. Not to take away from the thread, but to add to it.. The new(ish) sound code seems like it needs a lot of work. Beams sound horrible and don't switch between channels very well at all... Related to the above, I've had sounds not play in even simpler missions for whatever reason.

Err... but I don't want to bombard the coders with a list of complaints and a FIX IT NAO mentality. I guess, I'm just curious if anyone is still working on the sound code since Antipodes 6 went into trunk.

[Sushi]

This is a great question. Not to take away from the thread, but to add to it.. The new(ish) sound code seems like it needs a lot of work. Beams sound horrible and don't switch between channels very well at all... Related to the above, I've had sounds not play in even simpler missions for whatever reason.

Err... but I don't want to bombard the coders with a list of complaints and a FIX IT NAO mentality. I guess, I'm just curious if anyone is still working on the sound code since Antipodes 6 went into trunk.

I've noticed the same problems, although I haven't had a chance to really look into them. The sound code is an area I'm not at all familiar with anyway...

[General Battuta]

Some things seem to get really loud and staticky - being next to a full wing warping in is a painful experience at times.

[Astronomiya]

Some things seem to get really loud and staticky - being next to a full wing warping in is a painful experience at times.

They're staticy because it's playing loud enough to cause part of your sound system to clip to protect itself.  I had the same experience with my setup; turning the sound down fixed the problem.  Of course, it shouldn't be playing that loud in the first place.

[chief1983]

If that's the case, perhaps simply turning down the in game volume sliders might help rectify the problem a bit?  If it does, there's probably a code fix to simply normalize all the volume levels down a notch or two.

[Kolgena]

Maybe. It might get rid of the clipping, but won't solve the issue that it'll be massively loud relative to all other game sounds, and that it's taking up all the slots of "maximum concurrently playing sounds" or whatever.

[Astronomiya]

Exactly.  The problem is not "effects out of whack with voices" or something, which would be easily fixable.  It's that certain effects are out of whack with everything else.  My amp shouldn't be clipping when the rest of the game is at a reasonable volume just because somebody warped in next to me or whatever.

[jr2]

Isn't... I don't know too much about this, but isn't the whole volume supposed to be set to "max", and different volumes are "-xxdB" in relation to that, with smaller numbers being louder because they are negative?

[Flipside]

It's possibly something to do with the volume multiplier by distance? The thing about the audio scale (dB) is that it is not linear, it's exponential, so it might make very little volume difference from a distance, but make a huge one when close by.

[Trivial Psychic]

I too experience the loud and echoing thunder sound in nebulae.

[Shivan Hunter]

Warpin sounds are too loud because there are usually several of them playing at once (a wing or several ships jump in) and while before, only one was played, now the intensity is additive.

Lightning is probably the same way: lightning strikes when another lightning sound is still being played, and it adds to it instead of interrupting it. Fixing this would probably be as simple as decreasing the volume on these individual sounds in Audacity.

[sigtau]

Myself being the one indirectly responsible for the lightning and thunder sounds put into the Media VPs (in addition to all of the new sound replacements), we are discussing the new sound code and not inherent problems with the sounds themselves, correct?

If not, I'd be happy to patch the HD sounds and repackage them for FSU.

[General Battuta]

Myself being the one indirectly responsible for the lightning and thunder sounds put into the Media VPs (in addition to all of the new sound replacements), we are discussing the new sound code and not inherent problems with the sounds themselves, correct?

If not, I'd be happy to patch the HD sounds and repackage them for FSU.

They're probably too loud.

[Sushi]

Pretty sure at least some of the problems are due to the new sound code.

[General Battuta]

Yeah that too. Somehow it's just more prone to this crazy clipping.

[Shivan Hunter]

The problem is with the sound files themselves being too loud, it just wasn't a problem until a sound could play over another instance of itself instead of interrupting it. Before the new sound code, when a wing of fighters jumped in next to you, you would only hear one warpin sound. Now you hear 3 or 4 or 6 or whatever, which increases the intensity.

The solution is to decrease the sound files' intensity proportionally to the average increase in how many of them are played at once. For warp effects I'd say 3, so it's slightly louder with a wing of 4 yet still audible with only 1. For lightning, that depends heavily on the storm used. (We need more than just 2 lightning effects anyway)

[mjn.mixael]

What? No, the sound code should simply cap the volume at a certain level...

[Flipside]

Digital Sound isn't additive, so unless it's actually the CPU struggling to deal with the data rate, it shouldn't matter how many are playing at the same time, the worst you should experience is a cheap 'plate echo' effect if multiple copies of the same sound are played at the same time.

Does the game add reverb for 3D Audio? I've seen that cause problems before, my old Audigy used to go haywire during one FPS, I think it was Fear, when you went into a pipe and the game tried to add echo to all the audio. It ended up getting caught in an echo feedback loop, and that could cause the effects described here.

[mjn.mixael]

Yes.. the new code adds a crapton of reverb.. (never was a fan of that really... )