I spent about 3 or 4 hours on Chalenges sounds last night, and I beleive Claude and I have solved almost all of the issues it had, list below.
Just for personal use of course, I don't feel releasing them would be right, none of it is my work!
Volume and levels
- Matched every engine's cruise volume to the stock sounds, for both planes and tanks. Before this the pack ran about 9–11 dB louder than stock.
- Balanced full-throttle levels across planes. The game has only one "your engine" slider, so a loud plane can't be turned down by itself. Each plane now sits close to stock and close to the others.
- Fixed about 110 sounds where the levels were way off from one sound to the next.
Engine loops
- Repaired the seams in 64 looping sounds, so engines no longer click, bump or swell on each repeat.
- Smoothed out the "pumping" swell in the ambient loops.
Start-up and shut-down
- If your engine is already running when you spawn, it no longer plays the whole start-up sequence.
- Start-up and shut-down sounds are now no louder than that plane's engine at full throttle. The F4U shutdown used to sound like thunder.
- Tank start-ups are now clearly audible (they were very quiet before).
WEP
- Made WEP consistent across aircraft. Some planes jumped up to +14 dB and others barely changed. They now all get a clear but sensible kick.
- WEP now sounds like the same engine working harder: louder, with a slight rise in pitch. Before, it sounded like an extra track fading in. The P-51D got a full rework.
- Trimmed the P-47 WEP, which was mostly bass and sounded louder than the numbers showed.
Other fixes
- Restored 10 mechanical sounds on the SBD-5 and TBM-3 that were silent.
- P-51B/D gear sound made louder.
- Stopped sounds dropping out by switching the audio from streamed to loaded into memory.
Tested in game: 190A-5, 190D-9, F4U, F4F, P-51D and P-47M all sound right. Tank shutdowns are still a bit weak.
Also fixed the engine starting sound when an aircraft entered your "field of hearing", saw no yellow text issues, I need to play with it more of course, but it can be done