State of the Game #212: Sound of war

Welcome to this weeks State of the Game! If the title sounds similar, it might be because of this is not the first time I have dove into the new sound system. Last time it was about expanding the sounds.

This week I have been focused on implementing final quality sounds, as well as a full sound LOD [Level of Detail] system. In general, every sound is actually 5 sounds! Look at this chart:

Here you can see each zone that every weapon, explosion, and game sound needs to worry about. These zones are all defined as distances, on a per sound level. Each zone has it’s own sound variations, volume, and falloff settings. The goal is to allow the sounds to naturally blend from one zone to another.

In addition to this, there is a priority system in place for each of the sounds and layers. It’s hard to visualize, but this can give you a bit of an idea:

Since the number of sounds we can play at any one time is limited, the priority system ensures that the sounds we care about MOST are the ones being played. We don’t want the players weapon fire sounds to be overridden by some distant explosion, but we might want a point blank explosion to override them!

Already this has made a massive improvement to the audio design of M.A.V., I would say an even bigger difference than the last sound update. I don’t have a demo video quite yet, as I was working out a large number of bugs during the week and just last night got it into a good and stable form. I implemented the machine gun sounds and assault rifle sounds fully, and did the first layer of sounds on a few other weapons. I still need to do proper volume adjustments through each layer.

I do have to say, the combination of better AI, bullet whizzes, impact VFX, and these new sounds can make battles downright stressful they are so intense! Make sure to stop by the dev stream tonight to see it all in action!