Project Reality Forums

Remember that footsteps are different depending on what you are walking on

mud will sound different to concrete for example, I suspect this is where the confusion is arising. Add to that any ambient sound placed in the map or from a nearby vehicle/firing sound/people chatting on mumble and there are many many many many reasons why in one instance you'll hear the footsteps and in another you won't. I hope that clarifys things.

And that has been explained a few times now...

The sound bug is an issue, it's been in for more versions than I can recall, not sure if there is a solution at all apart from decreasing sound radii, but that presents it's own problems with how PR works.

I don't get what you mean by soundstage, but I'm a mapper not a soundguy

If something is obviously broken with the sound, please be our guests and file bug reports. Those help us greatly. Do you think the team does not want to have optimal sound design?

Is this always on 128p servers or 64 also? Could be sound occlusion. And yeah the sound bug has many attempted fixes, but nothing has ever solved it.

Could it be that bf2 engine is not actually playing the sounds of footsteps when there is too much noise, like how the miniguns used to mute the whole map when firing. And we couldn't hear guys sprinting 100m away before 1.0 but we could hear them, when they were close or crawling and walking 20-30m. away.

Could be, yes.

[quote=""'[R-DEV"]Rudd;1998582']Remember that footsteps are different depending on what you are walking on

mud will sound different to concrete for example, I suspect this is where the confusion is arising. Add to that any ambient sound placed in the map or from a nearby vehicle/firing sound/people chatting on mumble and there are many many many many reasons why in one instance you'll hear the footsteps and in another you won't. I hope that clarifys things.

And that has been explained a few times now...[/quote]

It's not that, though, that would make sense. I'm talking about same maps, same terrain, same situations only minutes apart.

[quote="Tim270""]Is this always on 128p servers or 64 also? Could be sound occlusion. And yeah the sound bug has many attempted fixes, but nothing has ever solved it.[/quote]

It could be the sound occlusion, I guess.

PlaynCool wrote:Could it be that bf2 engine is not actually playing the sounds of footsteps when there is too much noise, like how the miniguns used to mute the whole map when firing. And we couldn't hear guys sprinting 100m away before 1.0 but we could hear them, when they were close or crawling and walking 20-30m. away.

That has never been an issue with the Ultra High setting, so I really doubt it. It also happens when barely any other sounds are present.

Prevtzer wrote:feel free to post defensive replies.

[R-DEV]Spec wrote:If something is obviously broken with the sound, please be our guests and file bug reports. Those help us greatly. Do you think the team does not want to have optimal sound design?

i have notice this, in 0.98 the footsteps seems very loud in 1.0 i only hear people running at 2 meters i got knifed always like that, when i am hear a footstep i try to turn around but is to late i just hear the knife sound and don't even see the face of my killer.

i would like to make a video testing this but needs 2 persons.

I just played a game of Dragon Fly, where I wasn't able to hear footstep until the enemy was about five meters away from me and for some reason all sound effects, including footsteps, sound weaker since v1.0, especially heavy vehicles, were I usually got scared shitless when a tank moved in the area, nowadays it's nothing special, not that I don't like some of the new and improved audio design, but when sounds seem to be traveling much shorter, there's a problem.

Guys if you think something is a big at least post your hardware and settings...


Look at it from our side 'oh something is broken' we test it and cannot replicate the bug

Why were the original footsteps even replaced? I dont get the "fix something that aint broken"-epidemic going around at the moment.

L4gi wrote:Why were the original footsteps even replaced? I dont get the "fix something that aint broken"-epidemic going around at the moment.

Fix something thats vanilla BF2.... Mention it one more time, I dare you!

The greatest difference in sound I have noticed is when I switched from my [good] Asus Xonar D2 to a Creative Xtreme Audio [overpriced]. I swapped as the Xtreme Audio supported EAX and I wanted to know what the Ultra High settings sounded like.

The result was much poorer directional awareness, and sounds that sounded fake/exaggerated. The directional awareness meant that the sound went from having a good 360 degree 'spread' to sounding as if it comes from 8 segments, with noticeable 'steps' in volume between them all.

This all led to an overall worse sounding game, and lowered my situational awareness a lot.

It also had nothing to do with any mods to the sounds as I was using the exact same hardware and the same game version between the two.

As Rudd has mentioned, the people that are having problems should include their hardware and driver versions.

Anders, I have a question: Should I use Ultra High, or just High? In my case is there even any difference?

Well, I had serious problems with my previous creative card on ultra with the exactly same experience as you mentioned. Even pre 1.0. It started with when I switched to win7. Then when I started making thr new sounds I did it with "high" settings in mind because I also thought the majority users dont have cards that do support ultra high. So therefore my experience is absolutely best with thr high setting cause I created the sounds this setting.
The best part of ultra high is the ability to have more simultaneous sounds playing. From 64 to 128 samples.
But yah, as everyone seem to claim, theres something serously wrong with the ultra setting and the bf2 engine on win7.
So yeah, I do encourage people to play on "high" settings.

footsteps silent? i use earplugs and i can hear footsteps from miles away. Before 1.0 i would only hear them from closeby.

Thanks for letting me know, I'll give it a shot. The actual sounds are great, it's the sound card letting me down.

Mikemonster wrote:The greatest difference in sound I have noticed is when I switched from my [good] Asus Xonar D2 to a Creative Xtreme Audio [overpriced]. I swapped as the Xtreme Audio supported EAX and I wanted to know what the Ultra High settings sounded like.

The result was much poorer directional awareness, and sounds that sounded fake/exaggerated. The directional awareness meant that the sound went from having a good 360 degree 'spread' to sounding as if it comes from 8 segments, with noticeable 'steps' in volume between them all.

This all led to an overall worse sounding game, and lowered my situational awareness a lot.

It also had nothing to do with any mods to the sounds as I was using the exact same hardware and the same game version between the two.

As Rudd has mentioned, the people that are having problems should include their hardware and driver versions.

Anders, I have a question: Should I use Ultra High, or just High? In my case is there even any difference?

What you wrote makes no sense because Creative X-Fi XtremeAudio is NOT a proper X-Fi card. A proper X-Fi card has an EMU20k1 audio chip, which is what makes it X-Fi. The XtremeAudio uses an older chip, very similar to the old Audigy SE cards (Source1, Source2, Source3, if you don't believe me).

What this means is that BF2 does NOT allow you to play on Ultra High settings, as it's searching for the EMU20k1 sound chip and its positional algorithms. XtremeAudio doesn't have that so you're either lying, or PR is playing tricks on you by letting you select UltraHigh, while in fact you're using Hardware and High or Software and Medium (BF2 default). To clarify this- would you say the sound is binaural or limited to certain number of channels?

[R-DEV]-=anders=- wrote:Well, I had serious problems with my previous creative card on ultra with the exactly same experience as you mentioned. Even pre 1.0. It started with when I switched to win7. Then when I started making thr new sounds I did it with "high" settings in mind because I also thought the majority users dont have cards that do support ultra high. So therefore my experience is absolutely best with thr high setting cause I created the sounds this setting.
The best part of ultra high is the ability to have more simultaneous sounds playing. From 64 to 128 samples.
But yah, as everyone seem to claim, theres something serously wrong with the ultra setting and the bf2 engine on win7.
So yeah, I do encourage people to play on "high" settings.

Having a binaural sound over stupid 5.1 and having advanced positional algorithms is what's best about Ultra mode. The EAX 5.0 is also much better than 2.0., but not just because of max voices increase.

Let me tell you this again, as I have done at least 3 times in the past - there's no issues with BF2 engine and Win7. BF2 uses OpenAL as its sound engine which is independent of OS. "OpenAL (Open Audio Library) is a cross-platform audio application programming interface (API) (Source)" As such it is supported on these platforms:
Before 1.0 sound positioning in PR was amazing, it was almost impossible to find anything like it with proper hardware accelerated binaural audio (vanilla and BF2124 being the only other 2). After 1.0 it has gotten a bit worse, but still amazing. Then with every patch the positioning and sounds got more and more screwed up and with the last few patches killing anything that was left of it.

So please, don't blame the sound engine or the platform which it clearly supports. The changes made in 1.0 and after are what the problem is and is what made me uninstall the game. It's sad that the lead sound Dev has no clue about the very sound engine he's developing for.

Well dont blame the sounds either cause i had the same issues with pre 1.0, fh2 and vanilla. So we cant do anything about it now unless there some fix with openal.

Prevtzer wrote: So please, don't blame the sound engine or the platform which it clearly supports. The changes made in 1.0 and after are what the problem is and is what made me uninstall the game. It's sad that the lead sound Dev has no clue about the very sound engine he's developing for.

Hes not only the lead dev, hes the only sound guy iirc. You seem to know a decent about sound, so instead of uninstalling why not look into it and try and fix this problem you have? You could say its the Devs job, but how do you think we all became Devs?

True story. Why say anything and express your extreme sadness by uninstalling the game?? I havent
Done anything that would make ultra not
Work. But since the only way you can play the game is by running it in your superduper 5.1 system Wich is very
More uncommon than stereo, why dont fix the **** yourself so you and your few ultra users can play the game and enjoy your positioning. I make sounds, not soundengines or api's.

[R-DEV]-=anders=- wrote:Well dont blame the sounds either cause i had the same issues with pre 1.0, fh2 and vanilla. So we cant do anything about it now unless there some fix with openal.

Creative makes the best sound cards on the market and presents the only option for hardware accelerated sound in games (R.I.P.). Unfortunately their products suffer heavily from bad software support/ drivers. Problems with Creative sound cards are not few and far in-between. What I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't blame your problem on the sound engine or the platform. If the problem was really there we'd all be experiencing it, but we aren't, it's just you and some other people with bad sound card - driver combo. Try to understand that as I've told you this at least 3x now...

[R-DEV]-=anders=- wrote:True story. Why say anything and express your extreme sadness by uninstalling the game?? I havent
Done anything that would make ultra not
Work. But since the only way you can play the game is by running it in your superduper 5.1 system Wich is very
More uncommon than stereo, why dont fix the **** yourself so you and your few ultra users can play the game and enjoy your positioning. I make sounds, not soundengines or api's.

I don't know what changes have been made or not, but clearly the positioning went downhill from 1.0 onwards so something must have changed. Either that or the sound engine became alive and made bad changes to itself.

[R-DEV]-=anders=- wrote:But since the only way you can play the game is by running it in your superduper 5.1 system Wich is very
More uncommon than stereo, why dont fix the **** yourself so you and your few ultra users can play the game and enjoy your positioning.

This sentence clearly shows you haven't even read my posts and don't have a clue what ultra-high mode does. Thank you for expressing your ignorance.

And btw I am the OP of this feedback thread where I tried expressing my problems and got nothing in return. And I'm not making another bug report because the other time I did that there was barely any DEV input and NOTHING has changed in 9 months. You also pretty much said you don't give a shit about this issues since you don't play the game anyway and you're making sounds with Xonar and ATH-M50.