About the problems of ZKs sounds and possible solutions

I just messed around with 1 firing Glaive and it turned out that this is pretty good to demonstrate what I mean:
In this clip, I switch back and forth between 2 versions, one is the default, the other one got severly truncated below 350(!) Hz:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rF9jaWG-bApFYPni4B0raMoFmWTsC30A/view?usp=sharing

So much of that puny glaive-cannon is just pure rumble without information. The basscut version is probably too extreme, but remember that this is 1 single glaive...

Technically it hits the ground, but the rumble comes fromt the gun itself... It´s apparent for 2 things: It doesn`t change when I fire at a cliff and some shots hit, others miss. And it has no delay between both elements, while the projectile has a flight time.
But that brings me to the complicated part:
Who can tell me how the game manages the sound as a whole? There are obvious things that are done to the samples - the closer the camera is, the louder it gets etc.

That is the unit-selection sound for glaives (or whatever its called...) The one at the beginning`s first half is chopped off.

Yes my guess is that it is not that apparent for most people because almost everyone uses headphones. exploit once told me at the beginning of a match "wait, gotta deactivate my subwoofer or my plates will fall out of the shelves."

You are probably hearing me collecting sounds from various places back around 2009, then doing a bit of mixing with headphones are no prior experience. Someone had to replace the TA stuff.

Cerberus is particularly annoying. It's a question of where the replacement sound will come from though.

quote: Who can tell me how the game manages the sound as a whole? There are obvious things that are done to the samples - the closer the camera is, the louder it gets etc.

You would have to delve into the engine. Maybe a current engine dev has looked at sounds, you could ask them. Perhaps the suggestively named variables of the sounds defs mean something to you.

• https://springrts.com/wiki/Sounds.lua
• https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/blob/master/gamedata/sounds.lua

AveragePlan

quote: * Could there be some kind of audio filter based on the number of noise sources on the battlefield at that time? What about doing more distortion/echo/smoothing based on the camera distance? Dulling things when you are zoomed out because there is likely to be more sounds noises on screen, but they are further away?

There is as far as I understand the code (be aware, I have absolutely no idea of programming/reading code).
Look under "SoundItem Properties" in the link GoogleFrog posted: https://springrts.com/wiki/Sounds.lua

GoogleFrog

This is going to be a long post...

quote: You are probably hearing me collecting sounds from various places back around 2009, then doing a bit of mixing with headphones are no prior experience. Someone had to replace the TA stuff.

I guess that was lot of work, and I think you ended up with pretty usable stuff. Tweaking the existing sounds seems like a much better option to me than a complete rework, for 2 reasons:
- The playerbase doesn't have to relearn to "read" zk's audio
- You managed to create a soundscape that is pretty coherent in itself. Tht is not a guaranteed result, especially if one gets lost in details on the way. Me and HiEnergy were working on the claw-mine sounds a few years back, and HiEnergy gave me a sound he made for the claw-mine, that sounded a lot better than the existing one when you listened to it itself. But when you would play it together with the existing sounds, it just came over as from a diffent game. It just didn`t fit in.
(I may have talked too much about the things that bother me I guess. I also think that the priority-settings are really really well placed. I had a guess that this existed because it is esp. noticeable with silo. Launching missiles from silo is always clearly audible and "presses away" other sounds.)



I still have a few questions:

- So, what I try to understand is the games internal audio-signal-path. How many different SoundItems can be active at once?
- Since there is a volume-fader in the player-UI, I suspect there is some kind of signal-sum that can be manipulated? Or does adjusting "sound"-volume in-game simply affect the individual SoundItems stettings?

Here is my current conzeptualizatuion of what is going on based on my ears, assumptions and what I hope I get from the code.
As an example I take a game-situation where you have 4 SoundItems:
- camera-position is map-center
- 2 glaives that are very close to each other firing to your left (west)
- a pillager-shell hitting the ground somewhere in the middle of the map
- 1 glaive firing to your right
- a silo launching a missile in the far north-west, lets say


This is how I try to visualize the signal-path for myself so far:
(Sorry for the weird, "mirrored" layout of the diagram, result of an earlier version)



I have left out several other processes/functions that are done to the individual SoundItems. The diagram is not about showing completely whats going on, but about to ask if I get the basic things of what is happening right...
So please correct me where I am wrong.

quote: Blowing up a lot of Snitches at exactly the same time sounds a lot louder than a slightly staggered explosion.

This could be a simple matter of physics. Just remember that we are essentialy talking about wave-functions. If you play the exact same sound twice at the exact same time, the result of that addition is spimply more amplitude. If the second signal is delayed against the first, you get phase cancellation.*
You could try to increase the value of "float pitchmod" for this case and see if you get a good result without weird side-effects. If the problem is caused by something else, I have no idea.

* [Spoiler]

quote: Should the files be on my harddrive or do I actually have to manually download them

The sound files from GitHub should already be on your hard drive. They'll be inside an .sdz file (just a renamed .zip) inside your zero-k/games/ directory.

Sorry if that was a bit vague... If you've got the steam version of ZK, the file you're looking to open is zk-stable.sdz (rename to zip first) and it'll have a 'sounds' folder in it. If you have non-steam version, it's one of two files with some long string of characters as a name. For either version, these files will be in your zero-k/games folder.

If you extract that with some archive utility, you should have local copies of the list of .wav files that you can see at https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/tree/master/sounds in a folder on your machine, and navigating it should have the same file structure that you see on GitHub.

[Spoiler]

Cloning the repository is best.