John from the soundteam has taken the time to answer a few of the points raised by the forum
Some great answers below!
lozz08
<" You’ll also be pleased to know that there is no hint of Russian, Mexican or any other wildly guessed at accent apparent." Racist much? >
Not at all, this was just in response to a lot of feedback from E3 where the accent of the Spec Ops guy was guessed at being Russian, French, Hispanic (correct guess) and so on. All of which was leading to speculation of ‘Is he really Spetsnaz?’ So to cut down on the confusion in the final mix we made him very firmly American. I have no issue with Mexicans or Russians, and even speak a very limited amount of Russian. ;o)
VictoryBlitz
<looks great my only suggestion for speech in this game is make the voices less robotic and disjointed sounding also when telling your men where to move leave out the part where the team leader says the grid numbers from the topographical map as this sounds so very robotic and in the middle of action would not be said. correct me if im wrong though>
The robotic voice is something difficult to minimise when using a concatenated system. There is simply not enough room on the disk to have every possible combination of order and target etc recorded. Not to mention the time it would take to get on disk in the studio. For example if we record Tank, Jeep and Truck, then record 100M through to 1KM in 100 m increments we record 13 lines. If we record “Truck, 200M. Truck 300M” and so on we would have 30 lines to do the same task. As it is each marine has around 1500 lines. If they were all magnified in this way it would be through the roof. However what we do have is everything recorded in tension states. So for example in stealth you whisper, in combat you use a loud projected voice and so on. Which we hope will make the speech much more in keeping with the tactical situation.
The mission update and briefing speech has been changed from the E3 build to have no concatenation at all in it so that it will sound far more natural and real.
As for the grid co-ordinates, we have where possible tried to make it as close to USMC comms procedure as we can, however, this is also a game, and for the sake of game play a co-ordinates system helps the player have a better grasp of what is going on in the game world.
Hir3ling
<Just remember to add the proper effect for Sabre's dialog so that it simulates what peoples voices sound like over comms, and yall have a winner. Cause if the guy on the other end sounds that clear and crisp, it's not gonna create the right atmosphere.>
Yes, indeed we have thought of this one, and on a more complex level. Having used unit level comms I can say that some of it is very clear, and you’re so close to the rest of your fire team that the signal is very strong and interference free. So we’ve taken a different approach.
If you are close to the person speaking, then you hear their voice in world. As you move further away this cross fades to your comms earpiece. Command traffic which is being transmitted from much further away has an additional layer of filtering and static. This way you can quickly distinguish between traffic from nearby, and command element, or other Fireteams that are not in the immediate area.
http://community.codemasters.com/for...4&postcount=32
Viiper
<p.s. Optional static & roger bleeps would be nice too....>
Not only is this included, but it uses a dynamic system that creates squelch and scratch noises that play over the back, so no two radio comms will have the exact same background static and glitching. There is no Roger bleep, but there is key on key off sound.
God^Cent
< What of loud ambient noise being transferred over COMS as you or others talk? (ie a very nearby explosion or whizzing bullets passing by?)
Also when using co-op will the same filtering effect still apply when talking to each other? Thanks guys!
Edit: AND If I'm wearing my headset can I only hear the AI commands over the radio through the earpiece on my set(Xbox) and near by troopers threw my surround speakers?
Basically what I mean by this is to treat any radio chatter(AI or player/s) as what would in this case be voice chat over xbox live only being heard on the earpiece on the xbox live head set.
Edit 2: Hmm Voice recognition? Imagine being able to navigate the command wheel without the need to stop firing. >
All awesome ideas. Sadly in the cruel world of dev time and technological limitations you sometimes have to make the tough choice. Voice recognition would be a great one to have. The ambient noise coming over comms is a great idea too. Sadly it’s technically very difficult as you have to find a way of working out which bits of the game are making noise at the position of the radio transmitter then re mix them down into a mono file to then filter and mix in with the Radio receivers comms. Very cool idea though.
We ditched the idea of processing player comms as on 360 and PS3 the quality of audio already sounds like a cheap AM radio and it didn’t seem like a good time investment to do this just for PC. We figured you’d rather we spend the time making something else, like distant gunshots that sound authentic.
I like the idea of your comms coming through the headset and real world sounds being on your 5.1 setup. And it is something we looked into, but it turned out to be very resource heavy to do this and difficult to support on PC. It was one of those calls where we had to say no based on the immersive gain of having it in game against the time and effort used up in making it work.
Great ideas though.
lozz08
<lol man I was joking hence the grin. I should make that more obvious.>
Yeah I know, but I have to give the safe answer being all official and whatnot. ;o) Not to mention it also gave me another excuse to make it clear that the much criticised voice from the E3 build is now gone the way of the Dodo. Just like now, where I’m doing it again ‘THERE IS NO WEIRD SOUNDING MEXICAN GUY ANY MORE!” subtle enough? lol
Adjutant
< Question to John from the sound team.
Did you think of adding a "trick" effect so that when someone is under fire and sends a radio transmission, the gunfire shots will also be heard by the ones who receive it.
In OFP, gunfire and explosions would be carried on by scripted radio transmissions. This was very atmospheric.
Please do tell me if the question is not clear.>
It’s very clear.
. Our decision was basically this. It would be a cool feature to have, but if it was a ‘trick’ rather than a true representation of what was going on then it wouldn’t be authentic enough for what we wanted. Often you can see in the distance a fire fight between the people you’re talking to and their opposition. If you hear multiple shots on the radio, but you can see clearly only a few shots being fired. Or you can see their being engaged by a sniper, but on the radio you hear an M240 blasting away it would be too much of a disparity. So I guess that one will have to wait till we can find a way of doing it right.