Realistic firefight sounds

[Naudian]

This may seem minor but i think this is the first time ive seen/heard this in a game and its real interesting:


While watching a demo video where the combine and gordon were in a firefight i noticed some realistic sounds - when a gun is around 20 feet from gordon it sounds like it should - bangbangbangbang - then when you hear one firing from like 100+ feet away the sound changes to a realistic pop-pop-pop-pop, which just royally gives you a sense of distance and realism and i just hope im not imagining this. :rolling:
(The best example of this is the sequence when gordons driving the buggy and those blue balls rolling around-what dey called?-trip up his car and he almost goes off the cliff - after that he runs into combine and just listen to the shots fired.)

Anyone else interested by this?

 

[Roland Deschain]

What I really wanna see in games is a dynamic representation of the doppler effect as the bullets wizz by your ears

 

[Loke]

Yes, I always wanted that type of gunfire in a game. Half-Life 2 made my dream come true.

 

[DimitriPopov]

This is among my favorite features of the game , that and the sound of distant gunfights that are actually going on. the pop-pop-pop just makes me all warm inside , I love it. Also , Valve should watch Heat or Collateral to get the hang of what relastic gunshots sound like , unlike most Hollywood movies.

 

[daveodeth]

the realism i want is the screams of the wounded, begging for a merciful release.



although how a IR rifle is supposed to sound is anyones guess.

 

[lans]

What I really wanna see in games is a dynamic representation of the doppler effect as the bullets wizz by your ears

Like in the E3 2004 trailer, where the bullets from the combine helicopter whizz past gordon?

 

[dream431ca]

If you've ever played battlefield 1942..you will hear that same effect.

 

[Roland Deschain]

Like in the E3 2004 trailer, where the bullets from the combine helicopter whizz past gordon?

Yep, but they should create an algorithm that works for all sounds. Like when you have a car speed by you, the doppler effect is simulated of when the helicopter whips past you. It's really not that hard to do if they can do rotational physics (which is a bitch). All they have to do is vary the frequency of the sound, so no need to recond different sound files.

 

[ktimekiller]

more realsim the better

 

[D_tunisia]

If you notice in some areas as well, if you are inside a solid structure the gun shots echo as well!

 

[Roland Deschain]

If you notice in some areas as well, if you are inside a solid structure the gun shots echo as well!

Once they get real time echos and doppler effect going you won't belive your ears. Even if you have the most flat weapons sounds, a closed room will make that gun sound superb.

 

[SubKamran]

Once they get real time echos and doppler effect going you won't belive your ears. Even if you have the most flat weapons sounds, a closed room will make that gun sound superb.

Is this what you mean?

Source engine: Sound

- 5.1 surround sound, 4 speaker surround
- High-quality 3D spatialization
- Custom software DSP
- Automatic DSP based on environmental geometry
- ADPCM decompression
- 16-bit 44KHz, stereo wave data with all features
- MP3 decompression (requires Miles license)
- Support for audio streaming on any wave
- Real-time wave file stitching
- Pre-authored Doppler effect encoded waves
- Pre-authored distance variant encoded waves

 

[GuNzABlaZiN]

That's what I like about HL2, the sounds are so realistic. So are the explosions, it's just a quick pop and flash with some smoke instead of like in HL1 it's this huge hollywood style firey explosion with hardly any smoke and a long lasting sound.

 

[Roland Deschain]

- Pre-authored Doppler effect encoded waves
- Pre-authored distance variant encoded waves

I think pre-authored is the opposite of dynamic. Pre-authored means that even before you start the game, the specific sounds are set in stone. Ie: a bullet flies by your head and you always here the same sound. Or a car rushes past you and you always here the same sound. Distance and speed does not matter.

Dynamic doppler effect and eches, would take distance, speed, (even angle) into acount, so each wizzing bullet would sound different (with only one fundamental bullet wizzing sound).

But I could be wrong

 

[spinkitten]

Most whizz sounds are individual 'whizz' samples, triggered when the bullet passes within a certain distance of your character, imagine a zone around Gordon, when a bullet breaches this zone - it triggers a whizz sample. The problem realtime doppler, is that the samples really have to be put together well, in a fps, most car engine samples will a be a second long loop - you have this loop speeding up and slowing down pitch relative to the car's own speed, often the most realistic sounding car engine loop in isolation sounds terrible once placed in the game engine due to this pitch-shifting process.

While not as realistic the seperate 'whizz sample' process allows far more fidelity and more importantly control over the sound. If you have a dedicated game car engine, you would have separate samples for each gear ratio, while this increases realism and reduces the artefacts of pitch-shifting; it can be quite a complex task in producing a cohesive set of samples all of which are at a steady rate at the different gear ratios. If your game/mod needs only a vehicle to serve a short purpose, then a simple single sample should suffice, though if your mod is advancing beyond the vehicular usage of HL1 or MOHAA, then a dedicated engine is definetely recommended.

I'm sure a dedicated audio programmer can divulge more accurate and detailed info on this, but I'm just telling my perspective as an audio designer. On a tangent, does anybody else love the squishy bullet entry sounds in D3, Clive Barker's Undying had a similar effect, but not on the grand scale of iD's sound design.

 

[Vegeta897]

If you've ever played battlefield 1942..you will hear that same effect.

Actually, it's fake.

They aren't dynamically changing the sounds on the spot like HL2 does.

Someone once tested this feature in BattleField, and he fired once shot. In the distance, his friend heard three. It's a prerecorded "distant gunfire sound"

Fake.

Man HL2.. Graphics.. AI.. Sound.. Physics.. EVERYTHING PURE GOLD!!!

 

[spinkitten]

From a programming perspective (i'm no coder, so don't hold me to this) but I believe it's very difficult for game engines to compute bullet information - as they are objects travelling too fast to compute detailed info like bullet whizz (imagine a game engine computing the trajectory of a SMG burst - taking into consideration the pitch shifting aspects of each individual bullet as well as EAX reverb and occlusion fx, I think it would knacker whatever computing power you had leftover. I think early hardware FX soundcards (SB! Live) attempted this, I remember playing Unreal with the EAX reverb (Large Room=Large Drainpipe Sound, Small Room=Small Drainpipe Sound). Today, along with more storage to play with, designers incorporate pre-authored sound design to recreate for the gamer, what the designers originally concieve, so if the designer chose a £3000 reverb unit to process bullet sounds, that is what the gamer hears, not some rough approximation from an EAX unit.

 

[spinkitten]

one new sound fx I heard was in Farcry, it layers a dry weapon sample, with a wet (reverberated) one, the further away you get from the sound source, the dry sound is lowered in the mix, and the closer you get, the lower the wet sound is mixed; simple yet clever. Though, it's only recently that you could be so flexible in sacrificing audio channels; I presume the X-Box version (64 channels?) won't have this feature.

 

[ItchyFish]

My new sony syetem 5.1 is in for a treat, i might have to treat myeslf to a good sound card too.

 

[lans]

I always liked the weapon sounds in HL - the sound design was pretty good for it's time.

I like the USP match already (in HL2) because of the sound it makes when shooting, even though the model isn't as detailed as the...my beaut the magnum.

 

[king John I]

its not about what sounds realistic its about what noise give your gun that lovely omphff effect, as for combine noises, year during some scenes where you just ehar gun fights in the background its pretty nice

 

[kaf11]

This is among my favorite features of the game , that and the sound of distant gunfights that are actually going on. the pop-pop-pop just makes me all warm inside , I love it. Also , Valve should watch Heat or Collateral to get the hang of what relastic gunshots sound like , unlike most Hollywood movies.

very good call on the heat/collateral sounds. mann is a genious. that scene in heat is one of the most realistic/cool gunfights, partially due to it simply having realistic gun sounds. im hoping hl2 has somewhat the same effect.

 

[GuNzABlaZiN]

I do think we could have dynamic doppler effects because the bullets aren't actual modeled objects, they are hitscan (instant htting) like in HL1. The tracers you see are actually rendered before the shot it fired, you never actually see a tracer on the first shot, only when you let out a long burst. The sound system will be excellent, nonetheless.

 

[gokumike]

This is among my favorite features of the game , that and the sound of distant gunfights that are actually going on. the pop-pop-pop just makes me all warm inside , I love it. Also , Valve should watch Heat or Collateral to get the hang of what relastic gunshots sound like , unlike most Hollywood movies.

why watch a movie to see what its like when you could shoot real ones and find out?

 

[The Mullinator]

I remember this a very long time ago (long before September 30th):

What is the sound system like?

Sounds are all driven by a script file, and sounds are played by label, not by .WAV filename, so once you add the hooks into the game code to play the sound, exactly which WAV gets played, over what channel, and with what probability is all controlled by the script. This is great because the sound guy can iterate on sounds without the help of a programmer. We also Doppler-shifted bullet sounds, which is just cool!

Half-Life 2 supports 5.1, 4.1, and 2 speaker systems. Half-Life 2 supports wave files with 8/16bit, mono/stereo, optional ADPCM compression, and arbitrary sampling rates up to 44.1KHz, and MP3 files as well. We support our own DSP in software. We're working with creative on supporting EAX for that as well.

The sound engine also includes functions for directionality and environmental falloff (atmospheric dB attenuation, etc.). Everything's modeling at real dB levels and all blended together. There's also a whole set of tools for adding dramatic soundscapes and multiple layers of audio - background, action, talking, etc. - that gets blended together cinematically

There's also very fancy stuff like Bullet sounds that are modeled and spatialized as continuous sub-sonic 120db sound sources moving through space.

http://hl2.gamingsource.co.uk/?content=faq

Maybe that will get some people more excited. Oh and "doppler-shifted bullet sounds" doesn't sound like real doppler effect algorithms to me, sorry. :angel: