Need help r educing sound pollution.

If anyone's been playing my little arena shooters, they should know that a big part of the game is... well... shooting stuff.

And every time you shoot, you hear a sound. That sound is usually a BANG!

Again, for those who have played my game, you should know that the number of sprites are around to 20-40 sprites total and spread out.

But, I felt a little crazy and pit 100v100 shootout in a small 640x480 space and the burst of sounds simply kissed my speakers to sleep.

So... can someone help me find a solution? Thanks.

You could lower the volume of the enemy gunshots, or even use 3D sound to lower the sound of distant gunshots.

Sushin

I've tried that, but it's still the same; only thing is, it's quieter. I think it's the fact that the sound starts playing way too much.

What I mean is, from my first post, the game I have in the arcade has 20-40 units all dispersed so there's only ever 2-10 unit all firing away at one another.

But in the problem I'm having here is that its more than just 2-10 unit in the same area. It's one tiny room with even 40 unit, not even close to 100 units or even 100v100 (200 units, though that was a bit of an exaggeration).

So my main question here is, how do other games handle an issue such as this?

I just played your games and the gunshots are absolutely fine. The doors on the other hand are sounds the player doesn't need to hear (unlike enemy gunshots) and that's what is polluting the game.

My suggestion is to only make the doors make noise when the player goes through them.

The doors are just extra. They're there just to give a sense of a closed room. I can get rid of those if I want.

My problem here are the immense number of shooting sounds playing. Here's the little project I'm working on.

Basic Instructions:

• WASD movement
• Mouse aiming, Left-Click shooting
• G to change weapons
• TAB to tell your team to charge or hold at the last point captured.

Steps:

• Wait a while until a few teams spawn, than press TAB and charge into the next room. You'll see what I mean then. It's not loud at all, but maybe keep the volume low just for safety measures.

Here's that little project:

Team Conquest

Uh, I see what you mean.

On top of the sound pollution, you might want to also reduce the total amount of NPCs that spawn, because at one point my fps dropped to about 1 and we weren't even in combat.

The sound just becomes absolutely terrible, even if one sound is playing and the game starts lagging, and it seems to lag for no apparent reason sometimes. It's unplayable really.

I guess the solution I would do is, besides the lag, make it so only a set number of gunshot sounds can be playing at the same time. I never had to do that so I'm not exactly sure how I would go about that, but that's the best solution I can think of. You simply don't need a room of 20+ guys to each be playing the same sound on top of each other.

Yeah, I have been thinking about that, but I also do not know how to limit the number of gunshot sounds that can play at any time.

Sushin

Well, it's sort of fixed.

I have reduced the number of units spawning, and I have capped the number of squads each team can have. But that did no good.

Then, I just played around with the sound levels. Not much that just.

So, I went and checked the audio object and change the panning model to Equal Power. Gun shot sounds are still flying Everywhere, but at least it does not hug the speakers to death.

Thanks for trying to help Sushin! This may not be the best solution but it is all I have found so far, and it works well enough for me.