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[TXZCJSP]

I've noticed something that I've never noticed before.
It's probably due to SPL Unlocker's ability to allow me to hear further.
When I'm looking at it from an outside perspective, the sound of the 109F4's 7.92mm machine gun reaches the camera faster than the bullet.

I heard the fire first, and then I saw the tracer rounds coming in.
Usually bullets travel much faster than the speed of sound.

Is it due to a limitation of the game engine that makes the sound instantly audible once it's fired?
If not, it seems like a good idea to consider the "lag" of sound propagation.

[FL2070]

Is it due to a limitation of the game engine that makes the sound instantly audible once it's fired?

Yes, but it should be fixable... it might be glitchy though, and if I added such a feature, it would almost definitely be disabled by default.

[SAS~Storebror]

Sound propagation is currently not part of the IL-2 core engine.
I have always been wondering whether it would make sense to dive deeper into this topic, but eventually abandoned it for the absence of multithreading capabilities in IL-2's core engine.
With multithreading, each sound to be played could get started in a separate thread with delayed start by distance.
This would cause certain glitches each time the camera perspective changes, but it'd be feasible.
Without multithreading, what's left is IL-2's message queue for delayed "start sound delivery".
However, this would mean that each and every bullet would need it's own message queue entry, eventually flooding the queue to a point where it would probably stop working.


Mike

[WxTech]

I've always suffered problems or oddities of one sort or another over the years when trying sound mods. My understanding of the implementation of sound might be a bit better than superficial, as I have made my own alterations to .prs files in the past. But I am nonetheless a dunderhead in this area.  The perennial lack of satisfaction with sound mods has made me leery of even trying them out any more. But I just decided to give this one a go.

And after some quick testing, unfortunately it seems the unavoidable oddities are in attendance. It's become a guaranteed bet for me; if only I could have such predictive power where monetary rewards obtained!   I've reduced the stereo volume setting to 0.1 as recommended, but this makes no real difference for me. I also tried disabling stereo sound.

The two main issues are:
- Astonishingly faint gun sounds, some being practically inaudible internally and from the closest external viewpoints).
- Motor sounds are dominated by white noise (wind?). This gives the internal and external sound an anemic thinness--no throaty growl. As the external viewpoint is pulled back to farther distances, the motor quickly fades to nothing while a hissing 'wind' sound remains at full force. It's as though my virtual observer, moving along with the plane but at a distance of many tens or hundreds of meters, remains deafened by the wind whistling past his ears; the motor sound is gone but the wind remains.

Also, explosions are awfully quiet.

I use no other sound mod, and no conflicts are reported.

[Frankiek]

I can confirm the low volume of some weapons as example the Hispano 20mm Gun in relation to other cockpit sounds

[WxTech]

After trying to isolate this 'white noise' component, I discovered that it's one of the rain sounds. I had modded EffClouds.class to increase the height range over which the sound of rain can be heard. (Incidentally, this is hashed classfile 9C3EBED8C1E7373A, in case anyone should ever have this class in a mod.)

Here's the weird part... with my modded EffClouds class this rain sound is heard in good weather with this sound mod! Previously I could only hear it in rain or thunder weather (naturally.) Strange how it should be heard in weather conditions explicitly excluded...

I just removed this classfile and now there's no more of this sound dominating--in good weather, anyway.

The motor and weapon sounds are now at a much better volume, perhaps still a bit weak compared to my otherwise 'stock' B.A.T. 4.0 sounds.

So, it's looking to be a keeper. (If for no other reason than that it has eliminated one very awful problem I've been suffering for a while. And that is the odd cessation of ALL sound except the dull drone of engines when more than a half dozen 4-engined bombers were within about 6km.)

[WxTech]

With the odd rain sound issue with my modded EffClouds.class mod quelled, I find that the wind sound is given much weight.

Taking the Zero as an example, when in the exterior view the engine sound is fine at roughly 100m distant. When pulling the camera in closer, the engine sound, in relative terms, gives the impression of actually getting quieter. The hiss of wind definitely gets louder, to the point of being perhaps of equal volume to the engine. The result is a terribly thin and quiet quality.

Inside the cockpit, the sound is much more like that of a modern turboprop crossed with a jet. The nature of a clattering bank of cylinder explosions is essentially nonexistent. Again, the hiss of wind is a distressingly potent contributor to the mix.

I suppose a tweaking of aircraft.common.prs and aircraft.common_w.prs are in order?   

[FL2070]

When pulling the camera in closer [from 100 meters], the engine sound, in relative terms, gives the impression of actually getting quieter. The hiss of wind definitely gets louder, to the point of being perhaps of equal volume to the engine.

I can't reproduce this. I don't even hear any wind-hissing at all in external views.

Inside the cockpit, the sound is much more like that of a modern turboprop crossed with a jet.

That's just what the Sakae sounds like with this mod. If you listen to the real engine, you'll hear the same sort of jet/turbine-like tone to it. Maybe, the sound is a bit too gentle? I'll mess around with the Sakae internals, expect some changes in the next update.

I can confirm the low volume of some weapons as example the Hispano 20mm Gun in relation to other cockpit sounds

As far as I know, this is simply impossible. Every gun sample is normalized to the same volume, and every weapon preset for looped gun sounds uses the same SPL value. Every looped gun sound should have exactly the same volume in game.

At any rate, maybe it'd be helpful to directly compare what our games sound like with the mod:



The stereoVolume setting is set to 0.1 for this recording.

[WxTech]

My results are certainly not as recorded in that video. As I say, .my luck with sound mods is uniformly awful.

I have used hundreds of mods of all kinds over the years, and aside from cases where I have not met requirements of had conflicting mods, the success rate has been wonderful. But when it comes to sound, there's a black cloud always raining on my parade.

My machine is a bit over 4 years old; i5, RTX 2060, Win 10, and so is not exactly a decrepit anchor.

[WxTech]

I changed the conf.ini Attenuation value from 7 (which I've used for years) to 5. That made a notable difference , but there fundamentally remain the odd issues. The external gun sound for instance, transitions from the crisper near to the duller far sound at what I estimate to be 50-80m distance. The thing is, even when the viewpoint is couple hundred or more meters distant, that dull far sound is still of roughly equal volume to the crisp sound as heard from right beside the plane, if not a tad louder (!). And the motor suffers something of a similar problem, where the far sound doesn't fade the way it should, and the near sound is unaccountably faint considering the closeness.

In short, whatever sound sample is in use does not come even close to obeying a real-world distance dependence on volume, within a surprisingly large range of distance. And the near samples are heard at no more loudness than the far samples out to at least a couple hundred meters.

I have no such issues with the stock sounds.

I tried an experiment where I eliminated all the wind sound stuff from aircraft.common.prs and aircraft.common_w.prs. This certainly quiets down the annoying hissing wind that permeates everything. Of course, I lose the open canopy wind component. I say, in the main that wind sound business internally and externally is rubbing my fur the wrong way.

[FL2070]

As for gun sounds, after messing around with SPL values, I've decided on a few lower values.

I don't know what you mean when you talk about the wind sounds. In all instances where I've installed NG-SE/NG-USM, the wind sound is very much in the background in closed-cockpit viewpoints, and almost if not inaudible in external viewpoints.

I'd be interested to hear what you're hearing. Please record a video of what you hear so that I'm able to hear it myself.

[SAS~Storebror]

Just out of curiosity: Could it be that your sound card or its driver are playing tricks on you?
I'm asking since I'm suffering the same or something similar from time to time, when my SoundBlaster Z resets certain settings after driver updates.
In particular, quite contradictory it's not always the "Smart Volume" but also "Sorrund" levels that cause sounds to be toned down quite massively, almost to the point where they become inaudible, for a while after a loud noise has been playing - i.e. you hear an explosion and for the next 60 seconds after that, you are left in silence, despite other sounds playing like guns, engines and the like.

I changed the conf.ini Attenuation value from 7 (which I've used for years) to 5. That made a notable difference

Does it change your impression when I state that this value is from pre-1946 times and doesn't even get read by IL-2 these days anymore?


Mike