Sound Design on Tribes: Ascend - Part 3

Question

Thought I would share this info on Tribes: Ascend. We just released our largest beta patch. Many new changes, 16 weapons/ devices, new maps, character class customization, and more. The full list of patch notes can be found here. http://hi-rez.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/297

I would love to get some feedback from the community on my sound design.

To get a beta key all you have to do is go to the Tribes: Ascend facebook page and 'LIKE' it.

-Benjie

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Thanks for the feedback!

The hit sound only plays when you impact on pawn. Otherwise it will just play the terrain impact sound depending on what you hit.

All sounds in maps are attenuated and if you spin your character then yes the sound will pan around you like it would i real life.

There is a setting to turn team announcer VO off if it gets annoying for you. Chris Rickwood handles all the VO so I have no control over that.

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Ah, I see. The minimum attenuation of ambient sounds can vary obviously. Some sounds use a natural fade curve, rather then a logarithmic curve. The natural curve gives a smoother fade out when moving away from objects, but can be a bit more harsh of a fade out as well.

Also, the base with running water, the attenuation is a bit smaller on those because I wanted to have the water sound faint if you were near the generator, I tried a larger attenuation on 1 map and it was way to noisy and you could not hear anything else but water.

This is just one of those situations where you have to favor game play more then anything. Being that Tribes is a shooter, sound notifies of people shooting. walking or capping objectives take priority.

Dont get me wrong though I love making soundscapes, I had an older version of audio for the raindance map where I had 3k+ sound nodes on the map. Yes it killed performance and I had to remove about 2800 of them lol. But it sounded so cool. Every drop of water had a sound for all the terrain types. Water dripping off buildings, etc. It was pretty wicked.

Thanks for the feedback though guys, and I am glad your enjoying Tribes! Look out for a new patch soon.

Answer 1

Hey Benjie,

I've been playing the game quit a bit the last few days and have been enjoying the sound. One thing in particular I really like is the satisfying "thunk" sound that accompanies weapon explosions as a hit indicator. It only plays when you hit a player/object, correct? It provides great player feedback and feels really nice when you land a thumper blast or disc to finish off an enemy!

One small criticism I did notice though was the panning/spread on some of the ambient sound sources is a bit drastic. For instance, I was standing in a base next to a wall with running water while turning around and looking for enemies. As I was looking around, the audio source playing that water ambience loop kept drastically bouncing from my left ear to right ear. It pulled me out of the game for a moment to have such a localized ambience source. I'm not sure what implementation methods you are using, but increasing the min-distance on these types of sound sources usually helps.

Finally, the voice over... After playing pretty heavy CTF for about a week I am about to murder the announcer. "The Sworders have our flag!" I think some variety here would go a long way. A simple pick bag of 5 or so alternate lines for each announcer line would be nice.

Overall, great work! I'm having a ton of fun playing the game. Keep rockin!