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I am about to start a new VR game with a lot of guns and I have a question regarding weapons spatialisation if someone here has experience with this.

I need to craft a system that differs player weapon versus NPC (non playable character weapons) so based on past experiences I had the idea of designing a system that will use stereo guns for the player and mono gun for NPC in order to make the weapon feel more rewarding for players.

One of my friend mentioned it would be interesting to do LCR wav files versions of the guns used by the player but using a VR system such as a VR system (occulus), I don't see the benefit of having 3 channels versus 2 so I wondered if any of you had experience with LCR channels in VR - we are using Fmod studio here btw.

Thanks!

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  • Why wouldn't you just use the game engine's spatial placement of audio? A user's perspective changes as they turn in VR, so you really want the audio to track with the emitter. I'm not really sure how LCR would even make sense when using true positional audio.
    – AJ Henderson ♦
    Commented Jul 10, 2017 at 20:27
  • I agree and that's what I am aiming for actually : using a 3d HRTF plugin for spatialising the sounds and leave the player gun sounds stereo but placed on the game objects of the weapon that you hold. I just wanted other opinions for using LCR on player sounds (only) in a VR situation (even if I find it this useless in my case).
    – AudioDude
    Commented Jul 10, 2017 at 22:54
  • You would want your files to be mono in order to get the most of the vr spatializer. If position doesen't change you could add more stereo spread in the design phase to make the weapon sound more lush.
    – Dalv Olan
    Commented Jul 11, 2017 at 5:01

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I have no special experience in this other than being a VR user and a sound guy, but I'd hazard that it probably won't work all that well as you may turn your head in a different direction than where you are firing and I'm not sure how it would make sense of the information. What might make more of a difference is varying the kinds of reverb and EQing applied to the player weapon vs other weapons to make it sound more powerful and make the other weapons sound more distant.

You may also find it beneficial to mess around with the difference in sound between incoming and outgoing fire. There is a distinct difference based on the traveling sound source of the bullet whizzing past.

It's still early enough in VR that I'm guessing it hasn't really been firmly established how it would play out though. I'd recommend trying it and see how it sounds. I suspect it will feel weird when you turn your head relative to the gun and nothing changes, but it can't hurt to try it.

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