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« on: Friday, November 15, 2013, 22:42:58 PM »
So I've long noticed that the sound in 2.5 is a lot worse than 2.8.5 and, in many respects, simply inferior. The doors and footsteps are literally, completely silent if you take advantage of certain peculiarities in the game. For example, a popular glitch we all used to use in Invite-level competition was on Pipeline. When, on assault, rushing Primary (or to Main Pump basement) from Oil, if you keep running without stopping, the sound you actually make won't render for the other team until a moment AFTER you are directly in the FOV of the other team. This occurs even if an OpFor is on Basement floor crouching down and looking at Primary. For OpFor, the enemies will simply 'appear' there like a ghost, or like the theoretical result of a teleportation device, with no precursor indication.
Another example is carpet sound, which changed in 285 and became not only, subjectively, better-sounding, but also better for people to hear it correctly. I believe 285 also changed the internal rolloff filters. The gun clicks and nade-pin sounds in 285 were crisp, sharp, and could be heard nearly anywhere on the map, which also balanced out some of the game's peculiarities in its sound production. And they probably did this because they had to remove/disable shadows altogether, as a result of a graphical anomaly (which still exists in 2.5 today) that allows big, black, boxy "shadows" to appear through walls, floors, etc.
I submit, basically, that we should try addressing the sound glitches of which folks who are in-the-know can take advantage, and simply allow everyone to hear more. I don't know if this encompasses modifying the internal roll-off filters or whatever, but I do know that even someone without an X-Fi (or any 3D-surround audio interfaces) will benefit from being able to hear more and get an idea of where people are when they are near -- rather than sounds randomly going straight to 'mute' when you were JUST able to hear them. Instead, I think the sound should gradually decrease with distance, which is more realistic. So if this is possible to implement, it would be amazing, and it would stop me from being able to sneak up on people all the time who, realistically, should have been able to hear me.
Lastly, the big, black box "shadows" are still here, and I think it's time we either disabled the "Full" option for the Shadows (which is the only way to promulgate the shadow glitch), or we figure out why it happens at all and fix it. I'd go with the former, seeing as though the AA devs didn't even really figure it out; instead, they simply disabled being able to put shadows to "Full," but they allowed "Blob" because you can't do the glitch with the Blob setting.