Originally Posted by Les
I actually dislike hearing the same 'air-show fly-by' sound that plays regardless of where the plane is located in space and what it's engine is doing at the time, more than I do the gutless synthesized lawn-mower engine kind of sound effect.
Which is to say, I personally prefer 'Dynamic' sounds rather than 'Canned' sounds. That is, sounds that change dynamically depending on what's happening in the game, rather than pre-recorded sounds that just stop and start depending on what's happening in-game.
It's my understanding that Maddox games also prefer to use Dynamic rather than Canned sounds.
The problem as I see it is that their synthetic dynamic sounds simply lack the range and detail of the more 'organic' canned sounds that you can get with good quality field-recordings.
I honestly think if their synthetic sounds were just 'beefier' and didn't loop with such obvious digital precision there'd be a lot fewer compaints about the sound in general. And it puzzles me why they haven't ever 'beefed-up' and randomized their sounds more.
The kinds of plane engines we have in-game should raise the hairs on the back of your neck and strike fear into the hearts of your enemies when they're cranked up. If they were realistically depicted, people would start up the engines in their planes and just sit there revving the motor up and down like engine enthusiasts do in real life.
The current sounds are so far from that, and always have been, that it isn't funny. But I don't see ripping the sounds from other sources as a solution, even if you can find a way to 'get away with it'.
In my opinion the developers need to stick with using a dynamic, synthetic, sound system like they have in the past. But they need to introduce more variables into their sounds, pushing the complexity of it right up to the technological limit, and they simply need to find a way to make their engine's sound-samples sound more like they do in real life.
I suspect though, that to re-create those bone-rattling, hair-raising sounds using synthesized sounds would require a level of sonic artistry and mastery that most 'audio-guys' wouldn't have. Kind of like handing someone a Rembrandt and asking them to recreate it from scratch in some kind of 'Paint' program. Some people could do a pretty good job of that, but does Maddox games have access to audio artists of that calibre?
The way I see it at the moment is, the sounds of the engines lack the same detail and level of accuracy/authenticity that, for example, the graphical depictions of the planes have.
And beyond that, and just as important I'd say, the game has large amounts of it's potential sounds absent altogether. There's a long way to go in that regard too.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter. Just stating the obvious.
If they're re-doing their sound engine altogether, I hope they're doing it in such a way that it can call up more samples in a more complex arrangement than before, and that the samples themselves are more complex and tune-able than before, so that they can be made distinguishable from each other while still retaining that base-level grunt or power that these engines should have.
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