[Donion] [2.0.67] Sound balance way too loud when many sounds play at once

[AntiElitz]

I report this as a bug because I assume the intention was never to make players deaf. The sound balance is absolutely terrible and way too loud when multiple sounds play at once.

This happens specifically with:
- A space platform dropping all its cargo at once
- Multiple Turrets firing at once on promethium platforms
- Several mines exploding at the same time
- Several grenades exploding due to lag

Basically, any sound that plays many times at once is way too loud.

There should be the following additions:
- Do not stack sounds indefinitely, do not play more than x sounds at the exact same time
- Add a volume limiter so sounds that happen to be extremely loud are cut before playing to prevent hearing damage

Here is a clip showing how bad the issue is: https://www.twitch.tv/antielitz/clip/Ka ... kfmk3K99x_
To make it clear, the sounds in the video are already behind an audio compressor/limiter to protect my audience and the explosion sound was about 7db reduced. My reaction is not staged, the explosion was so loud I had ear pain for two days after.
Savegame is also attached, but that explosion there is not the loudest I encountered by far.

[Donion]

First of all I'm sorry this caused you pain. That's, of course, not the intention.

Looking at the clip and the savefile, the sound that plays many times is actually the stomper's stomp sound. It is supposed to be limited to 3 instances at a time but when the stomp causes the stomper to die, the stomp sound limit was not applied due to a bug and the sound is played many many many times.
I will get it fixed.

Cargo pods have their sounds limited for 2.1.

The rest of the sounds you mentioned are already limited, so they should sound as intended/designed. (I will double check the limits are actually applied)

Edit: Another issue with the stomper's stomp sound is that it seems to be miscategorized as GameEffect, but it probably should be Enemy (which has its own hidden volume setting).

[AntiElitz]

Thanks for taking care of this!
Whenever I am looking at my promethium ship the space combat is so loud that the chat has trouble to understand me. I am not axactly sure what it is, but i find myself scrollign out often to reduce the total volume there. I feel its the explosive rockets sound playing 100 times for every asteriod beeing destroyed, but I am not quite sure.
Regarding the stomper sound I felt the issues was that when the stomper dies it spawn 20 wigglers and all these triggered 50 mines around the stomper at once, because it was louder the deeper the stomper dies into the mine field. However I am not sure of this at all. It took me 20 minutes or so to actually find out that it was the stomper after all and not the artillery.

[Donion]

It's possible that the turret/explosion sound limits need some more tweaking for late game ships. We'll look at it and I'll let you know.

[Donion]

You were correct in your guess that there were just too many explosions from rockets hitting asteroids. I want to limit explosion and asteroid impact/damage sound counts further.

Sidenote: Do you know about/Have you tried the in-space-no-one-can-hear-you-scream hidden setting?

[AntiElitz]

Thanks for lookign into it! I know about the setting, but that just mutes it all. The explosions frequency is still rather important for me when monitoring the platforms. I guess the sound issues in space also are the reason that setting exists in the first place. Surely it's an indicator that the sound mixing can be improved there.
About the cargo pods - maybe it would be possible to get that change shipped before 2.1 also by limiting the sound duplications?

[Donion]

Alright, in the next release there will be following changes:

• Stomper stomp sound doesn't play a million times when dying in a mine field (this is the case from you clip)
• Cargo pod sounds are limited
• Explosions, asteroid collisions and asteroid damage have their limits lowered (it's still a lot of sounds, but there is a lot of thinks happening on the screen, we want to keep some level of crazy here)

[Donion]

Thanks for lookign into it! I know about the setting, but that just mutes it all. The explosions frequency is still rather important for me when monitoring the platforms. I guess the sound issues in space also are the reason that setting exists in the first place. Surely it's an indicator that the sound mixing can be improved there.

Gotcha. It's not muted completely, it applies aggressive low pass filter. And no, the setting was created as a fun little easter egg addressing the "but there shouldn't be any sound in space if there's no air" argument.

[Donion]

Btw. could I have your (sound) config.ini?

[AntiElitz]

Perfect!
I don't think the amount of sounds is any problem at all and actually great! It's just the loudness that increases too much when that happens, specifically when several sounds play at axactly the same time.

[AntiElitz]

Sure, pretty standard besides the alerts