Arrow Flyby Sound

[Ishtvan]

In T2, when an archer shot an arrow that went right past your head, you could hear a distinctive arrow flyby sound.

 

I think I may have a way to do this in D3. Every projectile has a "fly" sound that it plays while in flight. So what we do is, have the arrow play a looping flyby sound as long as it is in flight, but we set the max radius of this sound to be very small. So basically you only hear it as it flies by your head.

[Dram]

Sounds good

[Schatten]

I sense a problem here. The distinctive sound relies heavily on the doppler-effect, which D3 can't create AFAIK.

Also, creating a looping sound with the effect included would not work.

 

Would it be possible to give it a one-shot sound which is triggered if the player is in a certain distance instead?

[Ishtvan]

Yeah I see what you're saying.

 

I guess it would have to be coded specifically to play the sound once when it passes by the player, like you mentioned, because looping wouldn't work since it could come in during a bad time of the loop. That's probably how they did it in T2 unless the T2 sound engine could do doppler shifts.

 

Man, if only we had a better sound engine. We talked bout replacing the D3 engine with an engine called FMod, and decided it's possible, but would involve a LOT of coding work.

[pakmannen]

We do have some arrow_swoosh sounds on cvs. Didn't you add those to the in-game weapons recently? How did that work out?

[Domarius]

The way T2 did it had to have been simple, and it worked there, so why would we need something complex like a real doppler effect? Just during the collision test, maybe if it hits the bounding box but not the player model, play the whooshing sound.

 

Which should work because the bb is bigger than the player model, and testing for bb collisions is really fast.

 

Or something like that.

[Ishtvan]

Yeah, problem is projectiles test for one or the other, not both. We might need to modify the projectile code, I dunno.

[Ishtvan]

We do have some arrow_swoosh sounds on cvs. Didn't you add those to the in-game weapons recently? How did that work out?

Argh, dammit I posted and it got lost... short of it is: Yeah I added that, and it sounds fine for going away from the player, but I can't test how it sounds on the "receiving" end, because we don't have any AI that shoot arrows at you, and the "stoptime" trick doesn't stop the sounds.

 

I think Schatten is right about needing a sound that starts when it gets close enough to you, that way we can put our own doppler shift for coming toward you and going away from you in the recorded sound, and it will sound right.

 

I believe T2 only did this for very near misses.

 

We could try something like a looping sound that's phased or something, but that has an equal probability of playing the wrong doppler shift (ie, it would sound like it's going away from you when in fact it's coming toward you)

[Fingernail]

Well this is the thing about FMOD isn't it?

 

I mean, our sound propagation accurately simulates how sound travels and what the AI hear, but what the player actually hears is just vanilla D3 sound system, isn't it? The sounds don't occlude, muffle and doppler to the player.

[pakmannen]

Argh, dammit I posted and it got lost... short of it is: Yeah I added that, and it sounds fine for going away from the player, but I can't test how it sounds on the "receiving" end, because we don't have any AI that shoot arrows at you, and the "stoptime" trick doesn't stop the sounds.

 

I think Schatten is right about needing a sound that starts when it gets close enough to you, that way we can put our own doppler shift for coming toward you and going away from you in the recorded sound, and it will sound right.

I tried adding a doppler effect in the recorded swoosh sound, but you can't really tell any difference, since the sound is so short, and the sound already goes from a high pitch to a low one. So I doubt we really need regular_swoosh and doppler_swoosh sounds.

 

A sound that starts when the arrow gets close to you sounds good.

[Fingernail]

It might not have Doppler, but PHEAR NOT GUYZ:

 

http://www.bluesnews.com/plans/476/

 

They've added EAX HD support! So it'll sound better and hopefully have proper reverb and environement settings and such!

[Domarius]

I don't understand why people are talking about a real-time doppler effect for the arrow swoosh. Whatever way they used in T2 worked just fine (which was before games were doing real-time doppler effects). It all happens so fast, you're never going to realise it's a real-time doppler effect.

 

Arrow gets fired, you hear whoosh in almost the same instant or the very next, that's all that happens.

[Fingernail]

BUT NOW WE HAVE EAX HD

 

like Thief 3...so it'll sound good for the player.

 

The whole arrow thing is a slightly different issue, but this was really just further to my post that the player will still hear just vanilla D3 "3D" sound, with no per-environment reverb or effects, whereas now it can be via EAX HD, which is pretty cool.

[pakmannen]

Meh, I don't even own a Creative card.

[Fingernail]

THE WAY IT'S MEANT TO BE PLAYED :lol:

 

erm... I mean SOUNDS BEST ON of course

[Ishtvan]

@Fingernail: Woah, if that article is accurate and we get that in the 1.3 patch and the new SDK, that would be an awesome boost for the sound system! Reverb effects will make it much more immersive! Right now T2's sound is still more immersive than anything we could do with the D3 soundengine.

 

Are there any other sources that also say EAX HD will be in patch 1.3?

 

@Domarius: No one's talking about real-time calculation of doppler. We can't do that in the current D3 soundengine. We're talking about playing a pre-recorded sound that already has the doppler shift in it, as I'm sure T2's did. That is what makes the "woosh" sound so distinctive. Otherwise it would just sound like a bus stopping next to you or something, rather than an arrow flying by you. We just have to make sure the sound starts at about the right time and it'll be fine and dandy.

[New Horizon]

Yep, Eax has been added to the next Doom patch. Heard about this awhile ago and was quite excited as it will truly make our work easier and sound that much better.

[Fingernail]

Thinking about it, this (EAX implementation) could impact your propagation code, perhaps hinder it, but very probably help it in some ways...there must be a part of the code that sends info to the soundcard about when sounds are hitting walls, in order to give the environment reflection effect, et al.

 

I wonder how they implemented it...

[Domarius]

Oh of course it's got to sound that way if its pre-recorded. I assumed since doppler was even being mentioned you must be talking about doing it for real.

[Ishtvan]

Thinking about it, this (EAX implementation) could impact your propagation code, perhaps hinder it, but very probably help it in some ways...there must be a part of the code that sends info to the soundcard about when sounds are hitting walls, in order to give the environment reflection effect, et al.

 

I wonder how they implemented it...

I don't think it actually does that. I think the game designers give each room a reverb variable. It doesn't calculate reverb realtime from millions of reflections and repeated reflections... I don't think any realtime sound engine can do that.

 

As for hindering soundprop, I don't see why it would? I don't rely at all on the existing D3 engine as is, don't see why I would have to rely on the sound engine once it gets EAX.

[Ishtvan]

[edit: oops, double-posted]

 

Oh of course it's got to sound that way if its pre-recorded.  I assumed since doppler was even being mentioned you must be talking about doing it for real.

 

How do you mean? You can put a doppler shift in a pre-recorded sound and it will sound fine if you start the sound in the right place and time. In fact, the sound of an arrow, "whoosh" has two doppler shifts in it if you think about it, the "wh" is when somethings coming toward you, the "oosh" is something going away from you.

Edited April 25, 2005 by Ishtvan

[Fingernail]

http://eax.creative.com/gaming/reflection.html

 

explain.

[Ishtvan]

You'll notice there is only one bounce in there. Our sound guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing this effect is more for a "direct echo" than reverb, because reverb is made up of literally thousands of reflections of the same wavefront.

[Fingernail]

well yeah, it's a crude simulation. But it's closer than we could have come before using vanilla D3 sound.

[Ishtvan]

Oh I'm not denying that it's better than D3. It is loads better.

 

Maybe it even uses the initial reflections as a basis for calculating reverb later on, I dunno. I was assuming that it used the same methods as like EAX for Unreal Tournament where you specify a reverb environment for each zone/room, but you're right it could be more advanced. Anyway, anything with reverb is an improvement over D3.

 

In D3 they had to record sounds with reverb manually and only play them in situations where it made sense, like someone was shouting at you from down a tunnel you couldn't go down or something like that.