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Tanking: hearing impact sounds from far away?

Dwin

Grizzled Veteran
Jun 10, 2007
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While what I'm liking what I'm seeing of tanking from the beta gameplay videos, one thing bothers me that seems to have been retained from the original Red Orchestra: you can hear shell impact sounds from hundreds of metres away. That is, you'll fire at a target maybe, 500m away, and the sound of the shell penetrating will still be as loud as the sound of your cannon firing. This seems pretty ridiculous to me. Is this a design decision or an oversight?
 
In real life you can definately hear rounds impact from quite a distance. I went to an Armed Forces Day event at Aberdeen Proving Ground many years ago and they did a live fire exercise with a variety of weapon systems, including M1's. They were firing at large steel target panels and when the sabot rounds hit their mark it sounded like a bell being whacked with a sledge hammer.
 
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What annoyed me in the vid is that the impact sound itself was nearly always the same (sound and volume).

Also there suddenly was no battle chatter inside the tanks except from "LOADING!", "RELOADED!" and you never really seem to noticed what happens around you on the inside of it even if a crew member dies.

And everytime its down to "shoot at the enemy tank until it explodes in always the same way". Started to get boring only by watching that particular video.

No offense as this are hopefully beta issues.
 
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In real life you can definately hear rounds impact from quite a distance.

Indeed, but they should be (1) delayed and (2) slightly muffled due to travelling a distance and being absorbed/blocked by objects in the way.

Note that (2) doesn't have to be rocket science - it can be emulated by dropping away some high-frequency from the sound, by passing it through a filter. That should achieve a nice enough effect for a game. I'd say (1) is possibly more important though, in terms of realism and immersion. Sound over even a tank-range kind of distance, should be delayed. I hadn't actually taken notice of this in the videos, so apologies if this IS the case :) heh
 
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I suppose the only problem is when we start to think of delaying the sounds of tank's shells hitting off other tanks being delayed, is that this delay has gotta be different for all the players in the server, which means alot of calculations. And say if it were a tank map, that would be chaos. It would require a sound engine that took the speed of sound into consideration. I like the idea, but I don't think it's very easily implemented.
 
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I suppose the only problem is when we start to think of delaying the sounds of tank's shells hitting off other tanks being delayed, is that this delay has gotta be different for all the players in the server, which means alot of calculations. And say if it were a tank map, that would be chaos. It would require a sound engine that took the speed of sound into consideration. I like the idea, but I don't think it's very easily implemented.

Not true :) There is no requirement for server-side code, and implementing this is simple. The sounds occur at given points on the map - the server is already doing this now, the the client already knows where the shell has landed. When a given client receives this information, the client code simply calculates the distance between player and impact (very fast calc), and applies an amount of filtering based on that distance.

There's no server > client sync required, and each client takes care of filtering their own sounds - therefore no complexity based on player counts.
 
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What annoyed me in the vid is that the impact sound itself was nearly always the same (sound and volume).

Also there suddenly was no battle chatter inside the tanks except from "LOADING!", "RELOADED!" and you never really seem to noticed what happens around you on the inside of it even if a crew member dies.

And everytime its down to "shoot at the enemy tank until it explodes in always the same way". Started to get boring only by watching that particular video.

No offense as this are hopefully beta issues.

i've heard some screaming when commander died and some taunt when he killed tbh
 
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I suppose if it was client based, but what if there are more than 30 sounds happening in a second time period. Would the filter be a pre determined thing for different distances?

I guess there are a couple (or more!) ways you could do it. I believe when filtering sound, you can vary the filter based on the distance - so think of it as a multiplier that controls the muffling. Effectively the filter removes (high-frequency * multiplier) to get the final sound.

If this is expensive, you could instead load a number of pre-filtered copies of the explosion/impact sounds at the start of a map. You don't need too many really - you're not looking for absolute clarity in the way the sounds are modified, just a bit of distinction between key distances. So you could have one sound for 1-500m, one for 500-1000 etc.

I do think the distance delay is possible slightly more important than the distance muffling filter, in terms of the impact on immersion.
 
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If this is expensive, you could instead load a number of pre-filtered copies of the explosion/impact sounds at the start of a map. You don't need too many really - you're not looking for absolute clarity in the way the sounds are modified, just a bit of distinction between key distances. So you could have one sound for 1-500m, one for 500-1000 etc.

The problem i see with using pre recorded filtered sounds for different distances is that you would have a quite different sound if you were standing 520 m away compared to 490 m away, when really it wouldn't be that much different in real life. Of course this depends on the filtering, and if it were factored in multiples then it would be quite different.

Definitely the delay is probably more important, but I can't see the point in having the one without the other.
 
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