kappa is clueless when it comes to this wish, but also he really wants a wall of text, so here goes. I would have thought better of mitsu. hehe
HTC is getting ready, or is wanting to be adding infantry forces into the game. I know most people don't put much thought into this, but there is an issue with the way Windows games uses sounds and Doppler effects that limits the sounds we already have in the game in their effectiveness. You cannot hear an airplane beyond about 3.2k for instance, where in real life you can hear aircraft much further. However, that is not what motivated this request.
Infantry of the first world war would completely understand. Any soldier that fought in Guadalcanal, Iwo, (etc.) would also. Whenever there is a heavy vehicle, or a firm mounting of a weapon system, or deep water Naval gun or shore battery, there is a coupling between terrain and artillery. This is true for tanks also, but not so much for vehicles with rubberized tires. You see, the way the physics plays out with sound is that sound waves move through denser materials at a higher rate of speed than waves do through air. So, if a gun battery was firing on an airfield, or town, then the first warning in that town would arrive through the terrain. The same goes for artillery fire, or tank fire. It's also true of lighter weapons, but the range is significantly reduced and the advantage is defeated by bullets that travel faster than the speed of sound anyway.
This becomes really important to ground combatants, because your senses are very important and most of them have been removed in a video game (see kappa's post for instance, or Fish42's
). Ground troops would know about approaching forces, as would vehicles, because of the way sound interacts with ground features. Obviously, if you have your head stuck in a video game all the time you might forget how sounds occur in reality. In all this time I have never heard of anyone complaining that the Mach signature (supersonic shockwave propagation) for shells is missing in the game.
I finally completed my sounds and once I saw how well it fills in the missing pieces it really brought out the fact that so much more is missing. Since, you could not make the leap of where this request is going then you certainly will not make the leap on the rest, which I leave to HTC.
I do not believe that this type of sound could be setup without coupling to terrain, and that's why I went with the idea of ground texture ambient sounds.
