The colour and shape of sound in distance
 

Hello everyone!

I'm new on this forum, before a few days ago didn't even know it even existed. Allright, logic could've brought me here, but I'm bit of a vague bloke, if ye know what I mean.

So anyway, I'm new here, and I've got a bit of a technical question. BUT, this is my first post so might as well write something 'bout meself here.

My name is Alex, 32, live in The Netherlands. Long time fan of the IL2 series, got 'm all in me closet, just wonderfull stuff. More of a tourist flyer, ye hardly find me online, but still havin' a great time. Currently getting meself tested by the government 'cause I like everything, just hate details 'n get bored easily. That doesn't work in a job interview, ye know what I'm saying.

Oh, and I like alcohol, hence the style of writing ;)

So, now for the interesting part, I've got a technical question for the devs here, something the community hasn't been able to solve for me. Done some reading myself here 'n there, and tried a lot.


Everyone knows the effect of sound travelling great distances, the fact that some frequencies are easier carried trough air than others. The higher frequencies get muffled, they fade away sooner than low frequencies.
I don't know the technical slang for that, reading a wiki didn't help.

Once, years ago, I had a setup with Forgotten Battles, that had this effect. Artillery at short range had the full spectrum of frequencies in it, at greater distances you only heard the low "boom". Same with aircraft, near you heard the cylinders firing together with the propellor whine. At greater distances again only a low rumble and low whine remained.

One day I had to reinstall my XP...

I've been unable to reproduce this ever since. The sounds always sound the same, only the amplitude drops with the distance. Can someone help me with some settings? Maxing out in the setup doesn't help. I'm using an old Audigy under XP. Maybe I'm missing some EAX software? The drivers should be enough, right?

My install of 4.08m hasn't been modded, I tried all the usual options in il2setup.exe including modifying conf.ini by hand. DirectX is in good shape, my DSP works fine.

The reason I'm busy with this is simple, A lot of people are known to whine about the sound engine, but I'm sure a lot of 'em don't have this option working. It makes the whole sim even better!

Thanks for your time!

Has absolutely no-one got any idea what I'm talking about?

Hi you might want to install the "creative audio mixer for EAX & sound mixer panel" as well as the drivers.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1.../mixercopy.gif

Thanks, but that doesn't help. I wish I could write to someone of the development team, it seems this feature is largely unknown in the community, site after site, forum after forum.

You might want to be a bit more precise in what you are asking for, your original post is a bit vague :)

You sure it was Forgotten Battles that was capable of those sounds?

Could it be it was the Original IL-2 Sturmovik that did this?

He must be talking about FB, back then the sound was a lot more amospheric, but the sound engine was changed to stop cheating :)

Could you tell me what's unclear about it? I don't think it's vague. Low frequencies travel further through the atmosphere than higher freqs.

Think of a thunderstorm, when it's far away, you only hear Boomboomboom etc. When above your head, you hear KRAK or even TSJAARAKK, sometimes even with a whistle. That's exactly what I'm talking about, the ability of the engine to properly fade higher freqs with distance, only no-one knows the settings, no-one can exactly explain the conf.ini and nobody knows the engine can do it.

azimech,

you explained your observations clearly, there is no problem there

i suspect you had a good pc sound system initially and could hear the full detail of what the il2 sound engine could produce.

i know some minor changes were made to the sound/audio in il2 as the game evolved, and it is possible this is the difference that you notice now.

for me, when il2 was first released, i had a set of crappy speakers on the pc and a low level sound card, in the last years i have decent speakers and a good soundcard, so if the audio quality in the game reduced due to oleg induced deliberate changes, i might not have noticed it as much

oleg himself always stated that the sound engine in il2 was very good, and allowed for positional location of sound sources, ie you can tell the distance and direction from the sound source, so your observation might well be correct it also accurately represented the decay of sound over distance.

do some forum searches at ubi or simhq about il2 sound (partic posts/replies by oleg on this topic), it will show some of this information in more detail. i also remember not all sound cards could accurately reproduce this more complex sound modeling in il2, and oleg would often blame the players poor sound hardware if they complained about quality of sounds.

if you have the right type of soundcard in your pc, you might need to check its driver settings, or make sure you have the correct drivers installed.

Being a sound guy me self, i know exactly what you are describing but i've only owned the most recent version of Il2. I think there is more depth to the sound engine than what is currently used in game as well as actual device settings on the sound cards that people own. I've seen / heard videos that seem to get more out of the Il2 sounds but I have not been able to find a setting that reproduces the proper sound decay. This tells me that this feature either doesn't exist or requires a sound card that carries the components to get a decay effect in game.

BTW,
anyone know what EAX stands for, and what its intended to do in the game?

Bill