[2020] Sound in the game needs major work.

Replying here for visibility. We'll get to this soon, there will patch notes tomorrow for the past week listing what we have been focusing on so far.

It'd be very helpful to accelerate progress to talk to people who hate the current audio. In the past we've had groups for specific issues like performance or netcode and it's been very productive. Anyone who is on Discord and fits the description, feel free to DM me, you can find me in our public server.

Regarding the directional sound, here's a few aspects to this that I'm going to mention because in the past sharing info like this has helped people come forward with more actionable feedback.

• We've had some issues with 5.1 or 7.1 headphones in the past, where specific channels in some orientations remained completely silent, making directional sound very terrible indeed because you'd actually be hearing nothing from some directions. As far as I know, we generally fixed these issues but it could be that some people still have them in some hardware.
• Some audio issues may actually be netcode or networking issues: If your enemy is emitting sound from a position that is actually lagging behind them, they are gonna surprise you.
• Some specific hardware/software issues could also cause the above effect, if they cause your audio to have very high playback latency. Though I don't want to blame users' systems for our own failings, just something to keep in mind. It could also be that we have some bug increasing the latency, of course. Writing this I realise that we should show the current latency in audio settings, so we'll do that.
• There might be some people who don't have the above issues but still can localise sounds more intuitively in old games compared to DB, specifically in the horizontal plane. This is probably because these games just have more extreme stereo panning, so this is an easy one to fix, we'd just need to crank up the panning if we want to go into that direction or we could even add an option for people to set it.
• Vertical localisation is for us mostly a matter of sound design that we can also improve. For those wondering about ambisonics, we tried a HRTF solution in the past (the only good one available at the time) and we didn't like what it did to the rendering quality of the sounds. Also a HRTF solution may add some latency and some people may not prefer that trade-off. For quality, latency and (minor) performance reasons, we are favouring just having sounds mastered differently in different levels of relative altitude. We plan to integrate some HRTF solution in the future just so people have more options (there's more tho choose from now than in the past, the HRTF solution that Oculus uses is open source, for example, IIRC).
• Some old games like Quake, due to using the visibility system for audio gating, have implicit cues for positioning that people learn intuitively through playing, since some specific areas become inaudible from certain other specific areas regardless of distance. Our navigation system is meant to deal with this in a less arbitrary manner, using actual euclidean distances and taking into account the navigation of the environment, but it's possible that in order to approach that same level of situational awareness we may have to tweak it a bit. This could involve adding "audio black-hole" nodes that compress the audio space in certain parts of the navigational audio graph, for example.

But to reiterate, I'd like to talk to people about this stuff and try to identify the issues that people are having better.

OK, I'm going to guess that you are saying that the necessary sounds are being played when they should be played, but they are not audible enough (whether they need to louder, more compressed, or more emphasised through mastering/mixing of the global sound pool).

A hypothetical question for the sake of understanding the issue: do you imagine that the issue that you are describing would be solved if for example we were to substitute the enemy jumping, landing and footstep sounds with really strident, piercing tones? Not that we are gonna do anything resembling that, just to make completely sure we are on the same page to pass along the feedback. If that is the issue it means we may need to look at frequency/compression/timbre/tone/levels of those sounds against other sounds, for example.

I have the same story as u/nonstickswag I'm playing with a group of old quake veterans, everyone has pointed this out. It's quite obvious...

The levels are the same, at least in the audio setups that we have tested. We have also asked around our test group and nobody has this issue unfortunately. This is usually related to a surround setting at any software or hardware level.

You can find examples of the same issue in other games, and in all cases this had nothing to do with the games: https://www.reddit.com/r/PUBATTLEGROUNDS/comments/cytj8z/cant_hear_sounds_behind_me/ https://www.overclockers.co.uk/forums/threads/i-cant-hear-audio-behind-me-in-video-games.18865444/ https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/i-cant-hear-things-behind-me/164344

I'm surprised that you found a group of people where everybody has the issue, though, I would like to know what you all have in common that triggers this for all of you but I suspect you may be talking about different issues.

A Blizzard MVP advises: "Double check any headset drivers, graphic card, and audio sound drivers to ensure no 7.1 surround settings are turned on. This can interfere with the Dolby Atmos features." The same advise is probably useful here.

A user in one of those threads fixed by disabling "audio enhancements" (I assume this one is driver specific). Others suggested turning off the "Spatial sound" Windows feature (This is in Sound -> Device properties).

If you DM me in Discord or Reddit and don't mind answering a few things about your setup I'm sure we can figure it out, and this would be helpful for others, same for any of your Quake friends. A lot of people came forward with feedback about audio after I posted in this thread but nobody with your issue has done so yet, I just need anybody with the issue to do so, whether the outcome is to find out what advise we need to give to people in the future about it, fix something that we may be doing wrong or maybe add some options/info to the settings that would help people troubleshoot this.