*** Vendetta 1.8.323
- Added new sound effects for small ship explosions, swarm missile impact; also updated and improved existing capship explosions.
- Added dynamic light sources to additional "neon-style" signs and station floodlights, visible in the prototype DX11 and OpenGL drivers.
- API enhancements for Android and AndoidTV.

Some more data in the newspost as well.

Is there any hope of seeing the condensed station interface made available on PC platforms? Immobilized mobile devices aren't the only things plugged in to TVs. :)

Hmm. Yeah, we could make that an option. Is it a Suggestion thread already?

Sounds good, looks good. Any chance of resetting the escorts if you get a moment? Really even the local station voys have stopped.

Very good update! The sounds are neat.

I'm pretty sure I suggested it on there before but the lack of a post history feature on this forum makes it hard to track that stuff down.

Edit: Apparently I didn't. I'll go do that.

Hey guys, I'm loving the new sound effects, but they are a bit soft. Could you turn them up a bit?

but they are a bit soft. Could you turn them up a bit?

^ This.

The thing about high quality recordings of weapons fire is they never convey the sheer loudness of things like guns, cannons, and explosions. Think about how it sounds at an outdoor firing range. Way out in the parking lot it just sounds like "pop pop pop" off in the distance, like a kid is lighting firecrackers behind the bathroom. In one of the shooting stalls, it's still "pop pop pop" but it's now ear-shatteringly loud.

In things like video games and movies, you can't really do that or your audience will go deaf, so you have to convey the loudness another way. The old sound FX, while cheezy and low quality, did a good job at that. They clip, distort and utterly overpower everything else. If an entire stack of old swarms slams into your ship and it explodes, you can't hear anything else.

Some games use a compressor and a fake tinnitus sound to get the point across, but i think that sounds lame and the tinnitus tone is always the wrong pitch. :)

Honestly, if you want to re-do some sound effects... Start with the blaster fire noise! That stupid chirp basically every blaster in the game makes is just terrible.

new sounds are good. Though I did notice the old swarm impact sounds still kick in once in awhile.

I'm more referring to ship explosions like atlas, centaur and behemoths. Swarms sound pretty good.

The new sound is used on Chaos Swarms. Capital Swarms still have the old sound.

Hey guys, I'm loving the new sound effects, but they are a bit soft. Could you turn them up a bit?

Glad to hear it :). Volume is.. an interesting problem. All the new sound effects are just barely shy of clipping (maximum volume) as it is, but as arf says, it's more challenging to convey that volume without just blowing out the sound and making them sound all crappy and distorted (which is what will happen if we turn off compression/limiting in the soundsystem).

The new sounds have not been "ear-tuned" in the engine, because I'm making the sounds and Ray is adding them to the game much later (which is also why they're only on some swarms, apparently he forgot some types), so I'm not actually getting to prototype them in the game engine. That's just a byproduct of some engine change stuff lately, but I'll be doing more tweaking and tuning as I play with the production game.

All that said, the forceful "impression" of volume may not be there in quite the same way as the older, distorted and clipped explosion sound (which I did not make, I just didn't get around to replacing it for far too long). But, anyway, we'll see what can be done.

[EDIT] I'm pretty sure the falloff distances need to be adjusted again, for these updated sounds. Hopefully that'll improve things.

I can't have VO's volume set any higher than 1 otherwise it's insanely loud (and even when it's set at one I have to turn my speakers way down). I know I'm not the only one who has this issue. Perhaps this is part of the problem?

I've also noticed that the little beep for a hit registering is a bit loud compared to these new FX, and it masks them.

Some kind of volume fader for different groups of audio would be a good idea.

There is a huge delta between what greenwall reports and what I experience. I would suggest greenwall's problem may be a bug.

When I press turbo in game (and my in game FX volume is set to 1), the audio hits -25dBFS.

That's crazy fucking loud for the lowest possible setting, and it's always been this way on a mac since I first started playing in 2008.

I dunno man. I haven't tried the game on a Mac for a long time (Ray interacts with that port the most), but the audio is fine on my Windows 7 machine. I even play via a high-quality RME audio interface feeding my Yamaha HS80m near-field monitors.. which are pretty flat (as is my acoustically treated room).

If you can't turn the "volume" down far enough at "1", it seems like either we aren't adjusting volume properly on the mac, or whatever audio output you are feeding is turned up too far?

The actual sound mixing code should be identical on all platforms ("relative" sound loudness), but the part where we output to the specific platform-audio device, and control the respective "total" volume, could have issues.

i use all rme digital interfaces as well... honestly its fine, i just turn my speakers WAY down

It wasn't like that on my PowerMac G5's built in audio a year or so ago when I last played VO on it.