"atdm:voice" speaker volume out of control

[Sotha]

TDM has an entity "atdm:voice", which in conjunction with "atdm:trigger_voice" is incredibly handy for making player character voice-overs in missions.

 

I noticed that the player voice that plays is not controlled by ambient and SFX volume sliders in the main menu/audio setup.

 

If I put ambient and SFX volume sliders to 0%, no sounds are played in TDM. Only the player voice lines from "atdm:voice" entities are heard with 100% volume.

 

Is this intentional? Surely some volume slider should affect how loud the player voice comes out? Someone with headphones might have their OS master volume at high level and in-game volume sliders at low volume to make pleasant audio experience. This would then suddenly be broken by extremely loud player voice.

 

With this rationale, I propose that the SFX slider would also affect the player talk voice.

[ungoliant]

makes sense superficially. Garrett's inner monologue was always the loudest sound. But maybe should be player controllable.

[Obsttorte]

Just looked into it and there is a default spawnarg "s_volume" "60", what is incredible loud anyways. Maybe you should change that back to 0, so it uses the default loudness. (a value of 60 means it is played 64-times louder then normal, so I don't wonder the sliders doesn't seem to affect them)

[Springheel]

With this rationale, I propose that the SFX slider would also affect the player talk voice.

 

I have no problems with that.

[Sotha]

The voice loudness sounds okay if TDM SFX and ambient sliders are set high.

 

The loudness becomes a problem if the audio sliders are low, because they do not seem to affect the voice speaker loudness.

[Obsttorte]

The loudness is controlled via a cvar. If you set "as_player" "1", it uses a different cvar then if you set it to zero. I don't know what the default value is, but you may try differing this one.

 

EDIT: If you set the spawnarg "s_music" "1", it may be influenced trough the menu ambient loudness settings.

[Tels]

The loudness of that voice was to be controlled by an extra slider in the menu (everything else doesn't make much sense, because people do want to have the voice loud over almost silent ambients, or the other way round).

 

However, since the rest of the team decided that we don't need a player voice, anyway, (along with the choice for "female or male") the audio settings for it where hidden from the GUI. It should be fairly easy to re-enable them, they are probably just commented out.

[grayman]

Voice, sfx, and ambient should be controlled separately. If the code is already there, but commented out, then we should uncomment that code.

 

I had to stop playing Deceptive Shadows because the voice was jarring and gratingly loud. The only control over it was my speaker volume, but if I turned that down to where the voice was tolerable, all the other mission sounds disappeared.

 

I'd hate to not be able to play the campaign if that includes voiceovers and they suffer the same problem.

[Sotha]

Shall I scribble a bug report then?

 

"Create/re-enable voice volume slider in main menu"

[Obsttorte]

It won't hurt. Until 2.0 you could try using a different sound channel.

[Sotha]

It won't hurt. Until 2.0 you could try using a different sound channel.

 

Here is the bug report:

http://bugs.thedarkm...iew.php?id=3395

 

I think I'll avoid doing hacky tricks, which I would probably need to dismantle after 2.0 rolls out.

 

I'll simply advice people with 1.08 to play the mission with 100% SFX and ambient volume and tune their operating system main volume to levels that the audio is at a nice level. That way the player voice sounds just natural along with the environment.

[Obsttorte]

I think I'll avoid doing hacky tricks, which I would probably need to dismantle after 2.0 rolls out.

I was more talking about creating a new scriptobject that works similar to the current one, but uses a different sound channel for the sound output. This shouldn't cause any problems regarding 2.0 release. Alternatively one could use a different volume setting.

 

EDIT: For example one could replace

volume = sys.strToFloat( sys.getcvar("tdm_voice_player_volume") );  

which reads out the player voice slider setting (which doesn't exist now) by

volume = sys.strToFloat( sys.getcvar("tdm_music_volume"));

which is the slider setting used for ambient sounds. I don't know how the cvar is called, that is manipulated by the other slider, as it may be more fitting here. But this way it could be used now and the only change for 2.0 would be to switch back the scriptobject, by simple erasing the scriptobject spawnarg on the speaker_voice entities.