Make wood footsteps a little quieter

[OrbWeaver]

Playing through a mission today, I felt that the wood footsteps are a little too loud. They seem to "pop out" as noticeably louder than walking on stone, whereas as far as I am aware both stone and wood are intended to be quiet surfaces.

This is the adjustment I made in my local install to get the wood volume to approximately match the stone volume. The only change is that the volume line has been reduced by 4 dB (from -16 to -20). I did not touch the creep/crouch versions as these seemed OK to me.

 

Feel free to test and agree/disagree.

sound/tdm_sfx_movement_footsteps_player.sndshd

tdm_footstep_wood_walk
{
	description "Made by GoldChocobo"

	minDistance 1
	maxDistance 30
	volume -20

	editor_displayFolder	sfx/movement/footsteps/player

	sound/sfx/movement/footsteps/player/wood_walk01.ogg
	sound/sfx/movement/footsteps/player/wood_walk02.ogg
	sound/sfx/movement/footsteps/player/wood_walk03.ogg
	sound/sfx/movement/footsteps/player/wood_walk04.ogg
}

[peter_spy]

IMO it's not the wood surface that is too loud, it's the default Doom 3 stone surface that is too quiet. I prefer using TDM's tile surface instead, to make things more consistent.

[OrbWeaver]

I prefer using TDM's tile surface instead, to make things more consistent.

 

But tile should be louder and wood and stone, surely, because tile is a loud surface? Assuming the surface types are intended to behave the same way as they did in the original games.

[Springheel]

Wood is louder to AI than stone in TDM (I think stone is the quietest of the hard surfaces).

[Anderson]

It should depend maybe on the type of wood? Walking on a wooden ship should probably be louder than walking around wooden palisades or a wooden house. All of this depending how old the wood is.

[Springheel]

Realistically, yes, but the code doesn't track different kinds of wood. If we were redesigning the footstep sounds from scratch, tile would be the quietest and old wood and gravel the loudest.

[peter_spy]

But tile should be louder and wood and stone, surely, because tile is a loud surface? Assuming the surface types are intended to behave the same way as they did in the original games.

Yup, but these things should be mostly gameplay-oriented, and I think the wood surface works fine as it is right now.

 

Btw. can you decouple the sounds heard by players from what's heard by AI? IIRC, TDS used two sets of sounds for surfaces.

[zergrush]

As someone who lives in a house with a traditional wooden board floor, I can say wood can be very loud. Not so much the step noises, but the wood itself creaking under pressure.

[OrbWeaver]

Wood is louder to AI than stone in TDM (I think stone is the quietest of the hard surfaces).

 

Ah, in that case it makes sense that wood sounds louder to the player too. I was assuming we had the same division into "loud" and "quiet" surfaces as in T1/T2, and therefore all surfaces in the same category should have a similar volume.

[Springheel]

 

Btw. can you decouple the sounds heard by players from what's heard by AI? IIRC, TDS used two sets of sounds for surfaces.

 

Yes, the two are set separately.

[OrbWeaver]

On the other hand, if mappers are actively avoiding using stone surfaces because they feel the footsteps are too quiet, that might be a good reason to bump them up a bit. If I'm not mistaken the stone sounds currently in use are the ones I myself recorded, so I certainly won't complain if people want to make them more audible.

 

A volume of -10 (up from -12) seems OK to me, although much more than that and I think they would start to get overpowering.

 

tdm_sfx_movement_footsteps_player.sndshd

tdm_footstep_stone_walk
{
    minDistance 1
    maxDistance 30
    volume -10

    editor_displayFolder    sfx/movement/footsteps/player

    sound/sfx/movement/footsteps/player/stone_walk01.ogg
    sound/sfx/movement/footsteps/player/stone_walk02.ogg
    sound/sfx/movement/footsteps/player/stone_walk03.ogg
    sound/sfx/movement/footsteps/player/stone_walk04.ogg
}