Ambient vs information

Not sure if this has already been discussed somewhere but I thought it could be useful to discuss what ambient sound effects people find confusing in WOFF PE.

To me personally the most confusing ambient sound in the game is the sound of ground machine guns. When you are flying over the front or even deep in friendly territory (which I presume is a bug) you will occasionally hear a series of erratic machine guns bursts.

The problem with the sound effect is that it's way too loud and way too clear. Even though the ground machine guns are several kilometers below and away, they sound the same as an aircraft machine gun shooting at you from hundred yards. I have lost count of how many times I have started panicky evasive maneuvers before realizing it was just the ambient shooting.

I think ambient machine guns should be barely audible and somewhat muffled from any significant distance. Compared to the sounds of artillery and aircraft machine guns I don't know if they should be audible at all in a cockpit. The short an erratic nature of the fire is also odd. I would rather expect continuous fire from several machine guns mixed with rifle fire. I find it hard to imagine common WW1 Western front scenarios where just a machine gun or two would fire couple isolated bursts.

Another ambient sound that I have found confusing are air raid sirens. At least in UE on some fields you would hear the sound of distant sirens coming from nowhere in particular. These sirens have resulted in some pointless searching.

The most annoying ambient sound might have been fixed in PE but in UE there used to be a sound of plane passing over after you landed and it made me jump countless times.

I'd love to find that stupid siren file and delete it. Listening to it at 10,000ft over the sound of my engine drives me crazy.

I too have noticed pretty much all of the things mentioned by Mvp7.

The sound of the "random invisible airplane flying by when you are landing" is located in a couple of the airfield ambiance sound files and could be easily fixed by clipping that part out, so hopefully that might happen in a future fix.

I too have had a few occurrences of a machine gun sounding loudly and clearly while flying well behind the lines (like you are being shot from an invisible attacker, scares the crap out of you) . It is rare but is definitely a thing. I caught the tail end of one occurrence on video so could post if desired.

In general, it does seem that certain sounds sometimes don't 'range' properly, such as when you return to base far from the frontlines but can still hear all the frontline ambiance sounds (artillery bursts etc) loudly as if you were still there. This 'ranging' issue might tie together with the air-raid sirens and machine gun sounds that travel too far?

Agreed on the machine gun sounds. Flying along all happy when I hear machine gun bursts. I jig and jag only to find no one there. Still hear the guns. I turned on labels and there was a dogfight going on 4 miles away.

You guys using the click button “Realistic” sounds in the Workshop?

Yeah I use realistic sounds (with slightly reduced engine volume to avoid tinnitus). These ambient sounds are audible regardless of the sounds settings. I'd imagine the cfs3 engine is pretty limited in it's ability to scale and distort sounds so that's probably the core reason for the most of the oddities.

Interesting.
Don’t be afraid to re-name or move soundfiles from the game.
I’ve done that before especially with the church bells and air raid sirens though I have not felt the need lately.

Yep!

Same here with the MG sounds... they always make me jump, lol!

Thanks for this topic. I didn't know those sounds were ambient ones. I always thought that I'm missing action somewhere. I think this needs to be fixed at a code level because if you change the sound file, then it would also change when you're up close or far away which is not realistic either. It would be good to have the sounds so faint from far away and loud up close.

same......that random stuff....other than the expected thud of artillery over the front seems like it has always been there....learned to ignore it but it'd be great to put it into a real sound perspective. I expect the devs are aware and may be working on it....in addition to the GAZILLION OTHER THINGS....that make this #%&*$# great....nuff said

Yeah, I've played with that setting, it seems to do absolutely nothing at my end. Those distant MG sounds have given me a few grey hairs also.

I'm pretty sure the realistic sounds is just a preset for the volume sliders. It mainly increases the volume of engines and air flow compared to the other preset.

My current settings seem to have all but eliminated these sound attenuation issues for me.

Engine: 60
Effects: 30
Cockpit:30
User I/F: 10

A volume control for the music would be greatly appreciated, masterful as the score is, I find it obnoxiously loud .

Could be interesting to have a related discussion about what pilot could or could not hear in open cockpit.

One thing that seems especially odd in WOFF is how the sound of air flow works.

In Rise of Flight, you can clearly hear the sound of air flow all the time and it is close to the volume of engine sound. You could actually tell that you are close to stalling speed if you can't hear it over the engine and if it is drowning the engine sound you could tell you are going too fast. This seems pretty correct and intuitive.

In WOFF you generally can't hear the sound of air flow over the engine. The only times you actually hear it seem to be when you are either entering AOA stall or when you are hit by a gust of wind. Both seem (or sound?) a bit odd. Would the noise produced by stalling be significantly louder than the sound generated by normally flying at high speed? The wind also doesn't seem like that significant when you consider the speed of the aircraft itself.

I would also expect to hear the airflow quite loudly. I have little experience with an open cockpit aircraft, but imagine it being similar to riding my motorcycle at highway speeds ... the engine can barely be heard over the very load wind noise. Wind noise would help with the feeling of speed and give an additional cue to how fast you are flying.

I could be wrong, but I think there was a thread a few years back where a few people found the "sweet spot" for the sound settings (I remember they differed from Realistic settings).

If I can ever successfully manage a deep search through the forums, I'll post the link. If anyone remembers that discussion please chime in.

No, less airspeed means less wind which means less noise. You will get a different sound, shuddering and turbulent air followed by comparative silence in the actual stall itself.

The real thing is layered with more sensations than aural cues alone and this is impossible to recreate in a simulator. Rise of Flight has an excellent approximation of the actual sound of open cockpit flying which is because the RoF sound engine allows this. The sounds in WoFF work differently and so the wind noises are played as cues to the player to tell you things that an aircraft would actually tell you in flight.

Going to give Ace_Pilto’s settings a go.
At “Realistic” I think you hear too much. Over the front the sounds of the barrage are interesting but not realistic IMHO. In reading Pilots would say they could hear “ambient things” (like arrillery) only when they throttled back the engine to idle and were low over the front.
Which leads me to think in normal flying the main sound source has to be the engine. You’re sitting on top of the thing with (usually) the exhaust pipes very close. They also mention hearing the sounds (or they are supposing it for literary purposes) of enemy gunfire when close. Not a lot of mention is made really of what they hear because...engine.
Engine has to be loud as heck and by far the biggest source of sound.

I've tuned my settings to work best according to the limitations that seem to be present (The categorisation of sounds), a better way of dealing with this would be to take the actual sound files themselves and change the levels and then re-inject them into the game in a mod. I could probably fudge my way through this editing Audacity or something but identifying and then editing and getting them back in the game in the form of a mod would be something I'd need help with from people who have more technical expertise and who know their way around the WoFF file handling system. If anyone can point me in the right direction I'd love to give it a go and come up with a sound mod because the sounds are truly great base material to work with.

Just got back from a flight with your settings and I like them.
95% of what I hear is Engine with all else being a little faint (AA bursts) or nonexistent (barrage fire).
I like it. Just what I would expect.
As an aside most game designers have to (and do) make compromises between “fun gameplay” and what is “realistic.”
Too much realism in combat (considering it’s a video simulation) does not make a fun game for most people.

changing sound files will not have the desired effect of making sounds faint in the distance and louder as you approach. I assume that can only be done at a code level.

Back in the day I used to delete certain sounds files but then things sounded (or didn’t!) strange when the Engine was off. Guess I never realized the “power of the sound sliders.”

This is true, as I mentioned the limitations of the engine are based upon categorisation, not distance and attenuation in a 3D environment. My idea was to produce a rebalance of the existing sounds that blends better "out of the box" than the existing set. (Long story short, no 10,000ft air raid sirens or listening to trucks drive past 5 miles away)

The basic assumption of my idea being that most people spend most of their time in WoFF with their engine on. Why not balance the sounds around this condition rather than having people panic when someone fires and MG 15 miles away? In most modes of flight having the engine on is the recommended procedure. It wouldn't be perfect but continual improvement is a more viable pursuit than the dream of perfection.

Ok. Sounds like a good plan.

Along the same lines, I'm thinking that enemy machine gunfire from 100 meters away or more wouldn't probably be heard over one's own engine. So, if the damage sounds of fabric ripping, wood/metal bullet hits could be made louder and the machine gunfire sound made barely audible or even nonexistent then imagine the surprise of hearing your plane getting shot at out of nowhere because you were being stalked by the enemy.

To me that's a balance issue. Players need feedback to base their decision making on so I would prefer to respect that convention over "realism" in order to maintain an environment that respect the boundaries of simulation.

I was thinking more along the lines of a sound MOD with different options like realism along with other choices. Everyone's' tastes are different.

Actually all this things can be set seperatly in WS. So one who wants to have it more realistic, can make engine etc. louder, one who wants more hollywood can tone it down etc. Just play a bit with the setting in WS and find your sweet spot.

After all there are different accounts in memoirs etc. what can be heard and what not. enemy gunfire, archy, barrages etc. in real of course it also depends of the wind direction and gusts. everybody who has watched fireworks, can hear that sometimes a bang is louder, sometimes another bang is rather a weak pop, and sometimes nothing at all etc. Or just listen to the flak bursts.

Soundfiles are set to be in a 3d enviroment, especially great with 5.1 or 7.1 and to become softer when flying away etc. sometimes it's a sort of compromise. There might be glitch probably, when hearing firing AC miles away. Will need to find out.

Regarding groundfire, sometimes it sounds very short, sometimes longer, depending on how long the trigger of the groundgun is pulled. So short bursts might sound a bit odd sometimes. I will take a look at that, probably making it play longer, even though it's maybe just a snapshot, similarly to how i made rifleshots.

Cheers

I get the gist of this conversation and yes maybe some of the ambient noise is unrealistic and needs tweaking but overall I love the atmosphere it's creating. Like when you land and you can hear distant artillery and the tap, tap, tapping of people working at the airfield. Like most here I panicked when that noise of the aircraft overhead sounded....but again it adds to the overall atmosphere.

If the sounds and when you hear them can be improved then great but not at the cost of losing the atmosphere they're trying to create.

No worries Simes :-)

^^^^And that is another variable that demands consideration.

A lot of good points here. I would definitely like to hear a bit more than just the sound of the engine even if that would strictly be most realistic. The relatively small dynamic range of volume in games is always a challenge and simply scaling down the range of real sounds isn't enough for believable soundscape. Compensating for the missing senses is also important to consider.

It's not particularly relevant for the WOFF but one of the most persistent pitfalls of realistic shooting games has long been the sound of guns. Games like ARMA tend to use real weapon sounds and they just sound bland in the game, like you were shooting airsoft guns instead of rifles. In reality, all guns from air rifle to heavy machine gun just make a *pop* or a *snap*. It's the overwhelming volume and pressure that makes the real sound of weapon feel powerful. Games can't replicate that with just the toned down sound recorded on a shooting range. I think games with over the top weapon sounds (Goldeneye 64 and Soldier of Fortune for example) often get much closer to the desired feel for the weapons than the more "realistic" sounds can ever get.

In my opinion the airfield sounds, that you only really hear after shutting down your engine, are very good and atmospheric apart from ghost plane scares. It's definitely not unrealistic to hear artillery explosions few dozen kilometers behind the front even if the relative volumes aren't exactly correct due to the limited dynamic range.

Exactly. Not to forget the mechanical clanks etc. That's why in WOFF external sounds of machineguns are authentic guns, same as are the internal ones, but they aren't just toned down but an apropriate pop pop or ack ack (depending on guntype, period etc.) with lot of audible "information" lost when hearing them from farther away.

In addition to the too loud sound of distant machine guns (in PE) I seem to have no wind sound in the cockpit, even at 300 kph. I've had one PE mission when the plane was damaged and I heard it then (mostly the whistling sound as I recall) but otherwise nothing. And I have the cockpit sound setting at 100. That's the setting that controls the wind sound, isn't it?

Ditto! LOL, always gets me riled up and looking around expecting a bounce from Fritz!

S!Blade<><