Are sounds too loud?
.trixX.
Budapest Join Date: 2007-10-11 Member: 62605Members
Budapest Join Date: 2007-10-11 Member: 62605Members
CLARIFICATION: The question is about sound occlusion, not the amplitude!
It's kind of weird that you can hear players 2 rooms away. When I gorge I always camp around in places where I can hear half the map, and it seems to me too big an exploit to know where the marines are and how many of them are there, just by LISTENING, without aura.
It also applies the other way around: for eg, you can hear crossroads hive-drop from atrium.
I've meant to ask this question for a long time now, but I always forgot about it after quitting the game, but thankfully Wob reminded me:
It's kind of weird that you can hear players 2 rooms away. When I gorge I always camp around in places where I can hear half the map, and it seems to me too big an exploit to know where the marines are and how many of them are there, just by LISTENING, without aura.
It also applies the other way around: for eg, you can hear crossroads hive-drop from atrium.
I've meant to ask this question for a long time now, but I always forgot about it after quitting the game, but thankfully Wob reminded me:
Silence on shift hive is OP for the reasons stated above but I want to stress the information deficit created by silence + aura as mentioned by 2cough. It's so god damn powerful on every lifeform bar onos.
Moving silence back to shade hive makes sense for many reasons, the difficulty is fixing the problem that silence has become a crutch for: early game alien expansion vs easy marine aggression early game (major problem is skulks throwing themselves at the nearest engagement time after time after time)
Imo, skulks should be quieter by default because this would help the play style of rookies drastically
Comments
edit: this is a minor issue, although I do think it's worth addressing.
Oh to be sure, this is a minor issue :] But I'm guessing it could be remedied just as easily
EDIT: it used to be like that, I haven't played ns2 in a long time
Only option is to lower the distance for specific sounds(fmod) then increase the volume, i was actually thinking about this about a week ago when i was in battle as a gorge, all i heard was healspray sounds and for some reason the sound of healspray was deafening the sounds out in the environment with that said, player movement on both teams needs a volume increase and again, local-client sounds such as gliding and speeding through environment need to be removed or lowered, gliding as a lerk sounds so lame, what's the point when it just makes it harder for rookies and just offends vets.
Sound occlusion should really only be 2-3rooms max, 3d volume needs to be increased and 2d decreased.
To me? If so, you might confuse me with someone else... usually I'm the only one on pubs calling out where the other team is moving
Well, yes, seeing you clueless running into an ambush several times despite the noise
Well TBH the big bastards Space cow can be as loud as they want to be, so you can hear those ominous sounds. The rest and especially the sound in base are noisy...
Blame Creative for the jump back into the darkages of sound systems for games by them bankrupting these lads
I'll add this one as well, cause it's AWESOME!
/w more examples
Currently you have to "walk off" the walls to not be heard, which means a lot less room for error and a lot less potential ambush spots.
You can argue a lot of the sound in NS2, and I can think of many a story reason why it could work.
(But the main one is that nanites and bacteria are sort of everywhere.)
Yeh, it goes through walls, which is weird. Its 2 room away, which is weird.
But does it make sense changing it this late in the game? With all balance in the well.. balance?
Realisticly tho, small fix better than no fix so lower the volume at least yes.
I like what Overwatch does, where it uses the pathing system to determine sound volume, not just using the linear distance.
So if there is already a system for sound occlusion in place... shouldn't it be theoretically rather easily fixable?
Mmh dont think its simpler fine tuning a 3d sound engine than lowering a few absolute volume values or linear dropoff. It's not like a wall completely stops sound at 100% I mean
Well, I imagine that instead of fixing a value, you'd fix the drop off formula.
But I have no idea what ns2's code looks like.
Yea me either.
Im guessing wall occlusion is very bugged actually I never even noticed it. Im refering to how harder it would be to fix wall occlusion rather than just volume/dropoff rate. But ideally it would be of course a better long term fix for immersion and gameplay. But idk so many ppl are fully used to how it is, maybe for NS3. Beside just lowering volume/dropoff would not really adress the issue if you can still hear the same information by just turning the volume up a bit.
Sound takes it from reactionary to anticipatory... Do you wait above a door for them to walk through and then drop down? Or do you hear the marine coming and jump down just before he walks in and has a chance to clear the corners...
is this in its current form "OP" or even broken...Probably, but it's helpful to both teams and available to everyone, so it's "balanced".
Overall the sound system needs a lot of work.
Helpful to both teams is a poor argument for "balance" because of the asymmetrical nature of the game *hint melee faction*.
I'm so happy this has been brought up by someone else than me but I'm a little confused and even worried that more people don't care.
I think it's fairly widely known that silence on shift hive has given a massive boost to early game aliens. I think the reason for this is simply the information deficit created and thus the ease in traversing the map and engaging marines. Current skulk gameplay is abysmal by the entire ns2 public community except for when silence is involved. If we can make them not heard so far away it will do a lot for the early game which, if aliens are able to hold on to more territory for longer, means we can address the onos issue by nerfing them a little.
Better early game will have to be balanced out by nerfing late game aliens to reduce the snowball impact but also gives us an opportunity to change the onos explosion. This should help improve marine comebacks which are primarily PvP based (easier to frag lifeforms and get map control), as well as getting over that "predictability" of onos up, let's concede. Longer rounds, more to and fro, more fun.
Basically reduce the power imbalance of the early game so we can address the power imbalance of the late game
I think occlusion mostly works on props and other "details", and less so on geometry. I have no idea, though.
IIRC it works based on the occlusion geometry in the level.