I'm really tired, so I can't tell if this is sarcasm. Real gunshots are definitely loud things and if your neighbor was murdering his family across the street with a pistol you would definitely be woken by the first shot. If guns sounded anything like they did in Deus Ex people would be getting away with murders all the time.



Because JC is too much of a badass. If there were such an ending he would've assassinated Manderley and assumed control of UNATCO himself while talking in his gruff, monotone voice. Then he and Paul and Walton Simons and Bob Page would throw an augmentation party.

Well, a lot of gunshots DO sound like poppity-pop noises.

DX is more of the PSCHOOM type gunfire: more like the sounds you'd make with your mouth when playing cops 'n robbers, aged 5.

Sure, something like a 50cal desert eagle doesn't go 'pop', but if you're firing anything much smaller, it's basically a pop at any distance greater than 10 feet. Closer and it's a really fucking LOUD POP with a hint of "CRACK".

Real gun sounds are very disappointing.

I remember the original Rainbow 6 used real gun sounds recorded at a firing range. They were kinda tame, but it gave them a pretty neat realistic feel when you got over the initial disappointment.

I think one of the problems with using realistic gun sounds is that you need some pretty complex technology backing them up, otherwise you'll only get a limited range of the sound and it'll seem oddly sterile. Like I mentioned before, Medal of Honor: Airborne has code in place to add different layers to the gunshot sounds depending on how far you are from the weapon when it fires, and this was done by using something like 10 different microphones placed around the weapons they recorded and at incremental distances downrange. This meant that if at a distance, you only hear a sharp muzzle sound and then sometimes a faint buzz if the bullet passes near you. Closer on, you can hear more frequencies of the muzzle sound, and when you're really close (such as when it's your own gun you're hearing) you can hear the full crack of the explosion as well as the mechanical clicks of the firing mechanism. While I've never actually fired a WW2-era rifle, I'll be damned if MoHA's guns don't sound exceptionally authentic and really impressive all at the same time.

Of course they went and broke that realism by preventing you from reloading the M1 Garand until the clip is empty, because they really want you to hear that characteristic ka-CHINK sound it makes when it ejects the last shell casing. Cool sound, yes, but it makes the rifle quite a menace to use when you can't reload at will.

The only weapon I've ever fired is a .22 sport rifle. Now there's a gun sound you won't be hearing in a high-adrenaline action game, let me tell you that - talk about tame. But on the plus side, that also means it won't make you deaf.

The U1 Engine had reverberation and filtering, as far as I remember my time playing around with the editor.

You're right, but don't forget that the Unreal1 Engine had a terrible implementation for mod songs. If you listen to the soundtracks with a decent mod player (eg xmplayer) that includes high quality filtering, excellent sampling rate conversion etc. the songs sound a lot better!
Another reason for the "bad" quality of DX music is that the sampling rates of several instruments were very low. It's also due to the memory and CPU speed limitations 8 years ago. Affordable 4GB RAM machines with gigaflop calculation power were fiction those days. UT1 had a software renderer as an option, alongside DirectX and OpenGL, for all those guys who couldn't afford "high end" video cards. And the software renderer was quite good and pretty fast considering it was all done by the CPU without hardware acceleration.

Edit:

Rendering the game on CPU and playing high quality sound at the same time might be easily possible today but not in ye olde times.

To quote someone from unrealwiki: reverb is ick. And poorly documented ick, at that.

As far as I'm aware, it's a zoneinfo setting, so will apply to all sounds played within a zone. And it's very, very poorly documented, with the majority of arbitrarily chosen settings resulting in every gunshot peaking into an incessant tonal whine, or crossfading into horrendous distortion.

It's not fun.

Yep, you're right!
The sound of it is like the reverb of Synthesizers or Sound workstations 15 years ago: No density, fluttering all the time and sounding like played in a tin bucket.

They're like the gunshots you hear in a lot of older movies, minus the crack (older than Scarface, which I think began the tradition of blowing up gunfire). You could argue most movies today overplay gunfire, while Deus Ex underplays it.

I always thought the weapon sounds in DX were lame, from day one. The pistol is kinda okayish but would be better with a bit more ooomph, but the worst of the lot is really the assault rifle for me. In my army time I've heard a assault rifle, machine gun and pistol being fired and they all sounded far more impressive than any of the guns in DX.

Well it would be a bit depressing if real guns sounded worse than virtual guns.

Though for the record, in my secret basement science lab days, I heard an experimental plasma rifle being fired, and that sounded fucking pathetic.

So it's swings and roundabouts, I guess.

Plasma technology has significantly matured though, now they include 5.1 dolby surround headsets on plasma rifles so that shooters actually feel like firing a powerful weapon.

Research is still ongoing to find a way to let other people around you feel like you have just fired a powerful weapon. Finding a portable speakerset that is loud enough has proved to be a challenge.

I hear there's a sniper rifle that uses bluetooth to actually phone its targets and play them a BOOOM sound so they know how impressive the shot was before it actually arrives and near-vapourises them.

It's true, really it is.

How funny, I guess I'll have a laugh about it later.

I was just arguing that no matter if some people say that some weapons sound pathetic in real life too it doesn't has to be that way in DX, since it's a game. Pretty much every game has better gun sounds, even the lame assault rifle in Unreal 2 sounds badass compared to what we have in Dx. I rarely used the assault rifle in Dx because it was relatively weak, but the sounds made it feel even more pathetic to use.

It's not that much of a dealbreaker, but if there's the possibility and if it's not to hard it would enhance the game some more. And for the record there's nothing nostalgic about bad sounds in any good old game be it DX or not, they're just bad, nothing more and nothing less.

Sounds are a very different canvas to redraw, though: it's very easy from a theoretical standpoint* to make higher resolution textures, as you simply take the graphical information that's there and expand on it, adding more detail as you go.

End result: something that looks like the original, only better.

With sound, unless you're going to somehow take the original sample and remaster it in some fashion, keeping the underlying aural and spectral patterning, you're normally going to be outright replacing it with something you think sounds better.

End result: something that may sound like the original (or indeed may not), but that actually isn't related at all.


While I agree the assault gun sound is not the first thing I would associate with "machinegun", I find it every bit as iconic as the shape (and indeed concept) of the assault gun itself (which is another huge can of worms ). Shooting the same gun with a different sound just isn't the same.


*From a technical standpoint, of course, it's actually far more art than imitation, but you get the point

John... let it go.