Progress Report
I've gotten back to work over the past week and there are a lot of updates pending the next release. Currently, the only things left to do are finish the code for the new stereo sounds, and trace down some "cannot load sample: null" errors that started popping up who knows when, and then everything will be released to the public.
New features to expect:
New cockpit sounds:
- Integrated benitomuso's cockpit sounds by simply copying over his code, with a few extra null pointer checks for security. They'll be enabled with "doCockpitSounds 1" in NGSE.ini, and for crew member death sounds, "doDeathSounds 1" will also need to be set.
- Added a trigger sound for when your guns run out of ammo. If you try to shoot your guns after running out of ammo, you'll hear the sound of the trigger clicking.
- Added blackout deafening: when you are going unconscious from G overload, sounds in the cockpit will be deafened. This will also apply if your pilot is dead.
- Added fuselage scraping sounds; when your plane scrapes across the ground, there will be a separate sound for the fuselage scraping, instead of just using the wheel rolling sound.
- Added airbrake drag rumbling sound: this one's an old one that's been around since UV3, but NG-SE hasn't had it until now. You'll hear rumbling in the cockpit when you extend your airbrake.
Going further down the path of stereo-ificiation:
- All applicable sounds from aircraft.common.prs and aircraft.misc.prs will be stereo in cockpit views.
- Engine startup sounds for single-engined aircraft will be stereo in cockpit views.
Improvements to sound in supersonic conditions:
- There will be a universal sonic boom sound for all aircraft, replacing the previous sonic boom which was only for certain aircraft that had it specifically.
- Planes that are moving at supersonic speeds won't be audible from in front, making supersonic flybys much more realistic.
Internal changes:
- aircraft.common_w.prs has been completely deprecated, with the addition of a new "water" controller to detect if the aircraft is on water or not. This removes the need for two separate aircraft.common presets with one for normal aircraft and one for floatplanes. Return to stock behavior will be done with configuration edits.
- NG-SE will now not register invalid class name-based sound preset reassignments at all, which may increase performance slightly.
- NG-SE will now log its NGSE.log entries in the user's time zone instead of UTC if SAS Common Utils is installed. If SAS Common Utils isn't installed, the default UTC timestamping will be used instead.
Once this update is released, NG-SE will be considered feature-complete, and all future updates to NG-SE will be geared towards tweaking and bug-fixing until there's some other feature that someone points out that should be added.
After this update, also, NG-USM will start to receive updates to its piston engine sounds to fully utilize NG-SE's 180-degree angle-based sound modulation for more realistic flybys. Currently, I've only found enough variety of audio recordings for the DB 605 series to allow for this, but I suspect that it's possible to do it for Merlin engines, and possibly the Allisons as well. Time will tell.
There is some bad news, though: there's a very, very nasty bug that was brought up a while ago which causes a sound to play at maximum volume the very first time it's heard. After searching through large amounts of code for the source of this bug, I've eventually come to the conclusion that it probably comes from the sound DLLs, which are beyond my ability to edit. This bug is therefore declared assumed unfixable.
Author
Topic: Next-Generation Sound Engine v20240601 / Next Generation Unified Sound Mod v1.1 (Read 12961 times)
