The importance of sound for atmosphere

[mestylowe]

I guess it's kind of importance to have a "feel" of the game with the way the ambience is defined for gamers 

[soulburner]

This is some great news from Justin Bell regarding dynamic range. Over-compressed dynamics are a huge problem not only in music, but also in games and movies. I can't stand it how recent films have a car explosion softer than dialogues, ricochets louder than gunshots, etc. Similarly in video games - for example, Metro 2033 has too soft weapon sounds, which almost totally ruins the game for me.

I bet all audio engineers are fully aware of all this, but somehow not all of them decide to do anything about it. Who decides to make the pistol sound softer than a finger snap in, for example, Die Hard 5 (yeah, I know the movie is bad anyway, but the sound makes it even worse)? I can't imagine compressing the dynamics of the street gun fight in Heat - the loudness of that whole scene is 50% of what makes it so good.

I won't even start complaining about the loudness war in music

 

Thank you for making the dynamic range an important part of the sound design process. It makes me want to play P:E even more

[ScionKai]

I agree with a lot of what has already been said... The IE games had excellent ambiance, Torment stands out as particularly good. I look forward to what they will do in PE considering all they have learned in the last decade and the improved tools and libraries at their disposal. I'm not hoping for something on par with what we have seen in the past, but I want to see them blow it out of the water. When I take my character into a town for the first time, I want sensory overload on all of the neat little touches they did, and when visit a city, I want it to be a whole new level of impressiveness with all of the environmental sounds mixing together like a symphony never done before. They've done it before, I'm hoping they have another rabbit in the hat!

 

And one quick thing... Sound effects and the vocal element of spell casting. Playing IE games now it isn't as nifty as it was back then (I think it's because every spell uses the same soundbite, the only difference being male / female), but I really hope they put serious work into taking the sounds of spell casting to the next level. And weapon sounds too... Clanks of swords on metal chain, the thud of blunt weapons against leather armor. I can't wait to hear what they cook up as much as see it!

[hevymac]

I too would love to see the addition of at least redbook quality files.... I have had so much frustration with lossy voices and music in games! I love music, and as such I have a decent stereo with a decent dac, etc. I have a passion for sound, and there *is* a difference.

Some people are happy with, in terms of video, crappy quality 3000 to 5000kbps bluray rips. I am not. Watching Brave (for example) in it's near native, but still compressed, 25000 to 40000kbps is very satisfying.

 

Just as hand made pasta tastes better (and has texture), but the average philistine would be dumbstruck if you asked them if there was a difference. The people who say, "snake oil" are the exact people who have not listened to music through a well thought out stereo system. So how can they tell me that "you can't tell the difference" if they, themselves have not sat down, as you would with good gourmet, and sampled it's bountiful fruit?

I would pay extra to get high quality sound, I don't think I should have to, but if it's an inconvenience to the other developers, I would pay for it.

Just my two cents.

[xvart]

Sadly, we (audio people) must not forget is that a game is sum of many elements...
Having higher sound resolutions cost space (even server space) and computational power and again sadly how much money it would bring...

I am not sure about the numbers but I think the bottom line is the computational power (we still have graphics, physics, game states, smooth UI, memory etc...) now that games do not need to fit into CDs (or even DVDs to some extent).

[Pipyui]

Holy smoley, where are you getting your numbers from?

I may be talking strictly from ignorance of most things audiophile, but my understanding is that an audio CD at 44100Hz is 1411 kbps.  DVDs and Bluray at 48KHz would be 48*7(channels)*16(bits) = 5376 kbps. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate#Audio)

 

What in the hell are you listening to at 25000 - 40000 kbps?  I find it hard to believe that even the best recording and audio equipment can handle that level of fidelity without losing it in the reality of imperfect electronics.

 

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make an attack.  I'm just a skeptic.    <-- (disarming smiley face)

[Zeckul]

Holy smoley, where are you getting your numbers from?

I may be talking strictly from ignorance of most things audiophile, but my understanding is that an audio CD at 44100Hz is 1411 kbps.  DVDs and Bluray at 48KHz would be 48*7(channels)*16(bits) = 5376 kbps. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate#Audio)

 

What in the hell are you listening to at 25000 - 40000 kbps?  I find it hard to believe that even the best recording and audio equipment can handle that level of fidelity without losing it in the reality of imperfect electronics.

 

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make an attack.  I'm just a skeptic.    <-- (disarming smiley face)

Pretty sure he was talking about video bitrate there. 

[samm]

And for that issue, there'd be another, more suitable thread here: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/63884-okay-so-high-quality-video-has-been-covered-what-about-high-quality-audio/

 

This one was not intended to be about sampling rates or resolution.

[samm]

Yay :D Finally someone is pushing positional audio again, and even Creative's CMSS3D seems to have found a worthy successor! Along with the announcement of AMD's Hawaii and smaller graphics cards, they pitched something called "AMD TrueAudio". FMOD is along for the ride, as well as Wwise and GenAudio It features precise calculations regarding orientation and elevation and can, but does not have to, leverage an additional DSP for computation

 

Here's hoping that this initiative works out and the lack of quality brought along by Vista and the previous gen consoles is about the be replaced by something better again  

 

Maybe not relevant to P:E, but hopefully to Obsidian's audio guys in other contexts.

[BlackyNoir]

Yes, good audio design and great ambient sounds are an absolute necessity. Audio is as important as graphics.