Disrupting Ambient Sounds: Can we not?

[MissEvelyn]

Thing is, Arelith has a lot of areas with this issue. It would take time away from fixing bugs and adding new content to fix it. We only have so many area developers. Right now I'm working on a few areas and those areas will be toned down on ambience as I work through them, and I have a fairly sizeable project following that where I'll do the same. It's not going to be immediate, but as these areas are updated with new hak content and newer tilesets I think we will keep this feedback in mind. I tend to be pretty subtle with my ambience myself anyway, as I agree heartily with the original point.

Thank you

[Dr. B]

There are two sources of ambient sounds: sounds that are placed in the area, and an ambient soundtrack that is selected in the area properties menu. The latter is on a continuous loop, and the former are added to the area as (invisible) objects and can be tweaked to be area-wide or local, quiet or loud, and play intermittently or looping. I too would like to see more love put into the module's sound design, as it actually allows for a lot of fine-tuning, and with care and attention you can create some beautiful and immersive soundscapes. So my thoughts are this:

-Find some of the more repetitive placed sounds (like the "look out below" sound in the sewers) and tweak them so that they repeat much less frequently, and

-Use haks to replace the area-wide ambient soundtracks with better options. Also lower the volume on some of them. For example, some sparsely populated towns have a really loud "crowded city" ambient soundtrack that is both repetitive and doesn't fit the area.