So… we all know this recent spate of silent enemies is a huge problem.
Based on the responses we’ve seen, there’s a priority system baked in the back-end which determines which enemy should have priority (based on distance to players and threat the enemy itself poses, I’m assuming).
It’s unlikely the engine even supports this kind of thing, but I’d personally want the solution to the audio issues and prioritization applied by the system to effectively allow the player control of that feedback.
Don’t use the priority audio system. Make everything play at the same time, no audio should mute any other and give the players the ability to manually adjust audio via settings.
It’s not the most elegant solution, but I do feel that would be fairly ideal since it would allow us to set the maximum volume for each threat in the game.
I really do mean a fairly granular function, by the way. Banter lines, Vox chatter (not player in-game voice but actual character vox chatter) can remain as-is, but I want poxers/groaners, shooters, each elite, each specialist etc all with their own adjustable options.
For instance: I hate hearing muties. They’re a fairly minimal threat most of the time, but they’re also the LOUDEST soft-disabler, I’d drop their volume significantly so I can better keep track of audio from literally anything else.
Opt-in would probably be the way to go as It definitely would be chaos (more so); but, if the engine supports the granular options, we’d be in control of our own chaos.
I like the Idea, but playing on HISTG/Auric, we often see a line of specials (like 8 coming in a single file line).
Everything overlapping would be madness, because the spawn manager clearly can’t handle the spawning right.
Things are overlapping at times. And that’s bad when there’s no provision for it.
A pack of hounds or group of snipers has its own sound cue.
All the other specials do not.
There’s been suggestions for how to solve the mutant problem, which I won’t needlessly reiterate here, but I believe it is on the developer to create a pleasing and helpful soundscape.
That said, having the option to modify it would be neat.
Just be aware it might end up even more janky.
Edit: I’ve been pondering this further.
I remember when I got one of the X-Fi soundcards with its own processor (nowadays a historical curiosity due to multi-core processors making that superfluous). It could process, mix, and play 128 sounds simultaneously - and in Gears of War, I still managed to not hear my own gun.
There’s probably a priority list of sounds. First is the music - it would be jarring if that cut out constantly.
Then there’s the player’s gun, and steps/ability sounds, as well as other players guns.
Voice lines need to keep playing once active, but could be pushed back or dropped at start if the queue is full.
Specials sounds (besides callout voicelines) would be next in line - but there should probably be a cap on simultaneous play; High priority for one, dropping sharply if at least 2 have started playing in the last 1000ms.
Then all the other enemies.
Thing is: Pondering this, assuming Fatshark did the sensible thing and grouped all the chaff enemies into the lowest priority group, maybe even capped it at playing the three closest or so, I can’t see why there would be that many important sounds that they go missing so noticably often as to spawn discussions and/or forum outrage.
So something must get stuck before that. Meaning that, while we could use such settings to tune down mutants, it wouldn’t actually solve the problem - at least, not completely.
Sounds that never reach the queue for one reason or another can’t be picked up by your system settings, either, so you’d still not hear them. A silent trapper would stay a silent trapper because making “no sound found” louder doesn’t make it any more audible. I hope this is not the case, and I’d love more granular options, but it could well be technical issues beyond our ability to theorise in easy solution.