Quote:
Originally posted by II./JG1_Pritzl:
Sensei, I value your opinion, but on this one I think we'll have to differ. Perhaps because I rarely get sound idiosyncracies such as you describe? (though they are very annoying when they do occur)

I also recall Oleg giving some sound-cynic a chance to play the game at Maddox HQ and, according to the cynic, the sound was much better there. Wonder what settings/hardware Oleg was using?
I don't know what they use either (most likely Creative/Audigy and a bad implemntation of EAX support), but I often use my sound equipment for recording and editing anything from studio music to natural anumals (do video editing as well at times). The sound cards in my computer only have one upgrade and that would require a Mac G5 and about another $5K in equipment (and most likely having to build my own sound studio to house it.)

The bugs are annoying but the immersion killers are the supposed features. Specifically:

1) In multi-engine aircraft the dual sound of the engines is often merged into one distinct sound, muted especially at the bass level. Until you select the individual engines and adjust throttle, then the bass levels kick in. It isn't a sound card or driver issue as the game isn't producing that sound until the throttles are adjusted.

2) The 3D engine will render some sounds lower when it thinks other sounds should override. Most glaring examples are firing the guns...the engine sound is turned down. That's wrong. It's arcadish. I've actually flown a B-25, nothing overrides the sound of those engines. the artificial dampening is just that, artificial and I'm willing to bet it's because the sound engine can't render primary sounds simultaneously.

3) 3D positional sound (in reference to your amazement at the flak bursts) have been done very well--and better--in many games. B-17 the Mighty Eighth, IMHO, did it much better soundwise. Microsoft's FS9 renders sound so much better and richer than IL2.

In fact, I do believe their sound engine gets the Doppler effect wrong. It's right to a point and then suddenly shoots off the scale to either nothing or some abmormally high value. I'm almost willing to bet the variable they are using to hold the value is being overflowed and a high value integer is getting its sign reversed when they exceed it's value.

4) You can still hear other aircraft around you, even in pit with 2000HP engine screaming in front of you. If he fires his guns you hear them too--not the sound of bullets hitting you--but the actual gunfire. Everytime I hear that the whole immersion illusion just collapses for me.

5) The single biggest frame rate killer in the game is sound, well, maybe the new water settings might win out, but sound is still a major player. Try setting up a mission with 8 aircraft on a carrier top and watch fps. Run it a few seconds as they start their engines. Do it again with sound off and watch the difference.

It's even worse if you happen to have other aircraft flying above and behind you out of visual range but within the idiotic range the sound engine thinks you should be able to hear them--which you shouldn't once your engine starts. It's just bad design and coding. I've never had a game of any genre have sound drag down a system so much. Sound usually has it's own hardware to run on (on board excluded here) and should not impact performance at all much less to the the extent it does in this game. Why is it most people have to turn DirectX sound down to get crashes, lockups and stuttering diminshed? That's just wrong.

It's almost as if their engine thinks that at any point on the map you have some possibility of hearing a sound and then tries to do all the calculations to determine how little or how much you should hear if you were standing there. That may be true IF I were standing on a quiet meadow in the country. I'm not, I'm generally parked right behind or in between two huge, loud, engines. Anything beyond my wingtips is pretty much drowned out. They could save processing power by limiting the calculations needed (it's bugs in these calculations that I think account for the odd hearing of gunfire from across the map.)

I find the sound in this game, like a lot of the canned missions it ships with, to be poor, empty, lifeless, souless and lacking. It's cold and unimaginative.

Comparison for you. I have Rowans' BoB II. It sucks. Crashes all the time on me so as to be unplayable. Sound is mediocre. I prefer the sound in it over the sound in IL2. Hands down.

The only modern game I found to be worse in terms of aircraft engine sound is (before Starforce decided to begin erroring out and rendering it a useless coaster) Silent Hunter III. The aircraft sounds in there are abysmal.