EVE General Discussion

even better: allow us to turn off/turn down individual sounds...

sorry about this, but we just recently became aware of this.
It's not supposed to be louder and none positional in space. It may sound cool so loud the first time, but after 500 jumps, not so much - as someone pointed out at the audio roundtable at FF2013.

This will definitely be fixed for Odyssey.

Thanks.
we as a team and me as a designer are really working hard to get EVE back on the right audio track.
Too bad there isn't a recording of the roundtable, but let me go over a few of the things mentioned for our future plans.

CCP Baldur, the audio director, said that the JB ain't coming back and it's gone for good. The music in EVE is now system and danger specific. - the ability to turn off the music and play your own music in a seperate player or play the EVE music from our soundcloud page is the solution.

Playing without sound is always an option, but one of my personal goals will be to make EVE a game, where playing with sound will be an advantage. Not a disadvantage to turn it off, but with it on you will be able to get information that you otherwise would not have.

Personally I would like to make the game audio - AFK friendly. I'm not saying that I want people to play AFK necessarily, but I would like players to be able to walk away from the computer and then just by listening, be able to tell when they need to react or not and come back to the action.

With some of the new features coming for Odyssey, like the scanner and the crypto hacking sequence, you will be able to - just by listening - slightly be able to "before you click" decipher what is behind the various results.
Like with the scanner, you will be able to hoover over the results and hear a "distress" signal - very faint. but by knowing which of them is which, it will give you , maybe, just the help you need to not suddenly fly into a situation that you can't handle or perhaps into the situation that you specifically want.

The same with the hacking sequence. you can hoover the nodes and be able to tell what is under it.
which nodes, which scanner results that sound like what, you will have to figure out yourself.

But sound is becoming a tool. not just a luxury. it may take a while to get everything done, but for the future and every new feature coming, will have stuff like this in it.

and you are not grumpy. :) at least I didn't get the impression.

"Nobody is playing EVE with sound enabled."
"Let's incentivize playing EVE with sound by giving some sort of in-game advantage."

perfectly logical right?

not really because this view ignores that people don't just turn sound off because the sound is useless (and I would rather watch & listen to a TV series rather than listen to useless sound) but that there are other reasons why people don't use sound.

* EVE has been a pretty deaf-friendly game so far. Once important information starts to get conveyed via sound only that will change (and cause problems for players who don't hear well or not at all).

* Multiboxing is a fact of life in EVE. The current sound system is blissfully unaware of the number of clients that are running on my computer. Good luck trying to run just 3-4 clients with sound enabled without losing your sanity...
It's certainly possible to design a sound system that would do well with multiboxing (and not descend into pandemonium by duplicating music, environment sounds, ... across clients) but I doubt we'll see any such thing in time for Odyssey.

* You never get the distance calculations right. I've been playing EVE for almost 5 years, I have tried countless variations of the sound system (turret effects seem to get changed every other patch) and I can't remember any time during which it was just fine.
Currently the assumption seems to be that all players play zoomed in at default camera settings. I can only speak for myself but my zoom level usually represents the range of my ship, if I fly a frigate I might be able to see a radius of 15km on my tactical overlay, if I fly a battleship I might see 50-70km radius, If I fly a sniping ship I zoom out so I can see ~150km radius.
The current system means that I have to trade situational awareness for sound - unless I am zoomed in so close that my battleship fills 3/4 of my screen I don't get any turret sounds at all (similar for environment sounds).
There have also been incarnations of the sound system that featured obnoxious "infinite" sound that didn't seem to depend on distance at all.
My hopes that you will ever be able to deliver a working system for scaling sound with distance are extremely slim.

this is f*king amazing
i hope this comes true

So glad this is getting fixed.

I like to keep my sound on in EVE [eventhough some people would go as far as to berate me for this, specifically due to things like jump bridges.]

when Im going through a jumpbridge myself its no problem, but if Im in a 200+ man fleet, not only is the sound completely deafening and enough to wake up everyone in the house, I can no longer hear my fleet commander give his orders over voicecoms until the majority of the fleet has jumped

Edit: it seems a fellow CVA member has made this topic, either Provi has too many JBs or the providence nebula has a strange chemical reaction with the JB fuel that causes it to make an extra boom. :P

for now it's all the hybrids that has gotten a make over. after some time in the game we decided that they definitely needed some space.

At the roundtable we went over this quite a bit, trying to explain the differences between them and one of our main problems is that the "smallest" turret, is by the size of a Volvo, which kind of makes the smallest gun having to sound rather big and gives a lot of problems when it comes to mixing them all together in the EVE universe to sound so different.

but we are working on them. with the new audio stuff going on, they will be under constant review and not getting changed every 10 years as happened so far.

not to my knowledge. we were informed about this just the other day.

Here's hoping the new nullsec music mentioned at fanfest is good, I'd like to turn my music back on.

Definatly please try to incorporate being able to manage seperate volumes of sound when everything is implimented. An example if there really is going to be subtle hints to hacking/scanning ect i'd rather have those turned up and then all the other 'rubbish' that doesn't affect my gameplay turned completly off. Another example would be having wold volume turned on so that I can hear stargate jumps and such but then docking up and not wanting to hear the unbearable station effects.

/P

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