Thanks @Inappropriate I've found I get better results with any AoE weapon - Flame Thrower, Rocket Launcher, Grenade Launcher - if I aim at, and hit, the floor near the target. Actually hitting them does, as you say, appear to block the AoE from propagating further. For example, I had a cluster of Abominations at the bottom of some elevator blocks, I was struggling to deal damage to any of them from above - which you'd think would be ideal for head shots - so I started aiming at the block beneath them, and was able to deal damage to ALL standing on that block. So, any clusters of foes, I'll try to aim for the ground / block they're on. Thanks for the tip, and nested Spoilers, I have actually done this POI a number of times - though not recently - and was really trying hard to do it "properly" without any cheese on my part. As posted above, in my marginally frustrated state lol, I ran into a number of issues that made it hard to continue. I know I'm under-equipped for this POI, but that was always part of the challenge for me, taking on a higher-tier POI with low-level equipment, my agility and skill making the difference. The big thing for me - which is HOPEFULLY finally going to be fixed soon - is the totally broken audio. POI's would be so much easier if sounds came from the right direction and were muted by distance and obstructions. With current audio being plain wrong- stuff is NOT in the direction the game generates the sound from, period - it artificially raises the difficulty level. If I could hear that critter skittering behind me, I'd have a chance, as that critter sounds exactly the same and from the same direction as the critter ten metres away, behind several layers of blocks, I've got little chance. I really do rely on audio cues a lot in games. My basic stereo set-up usually does a pretty good job of letting me know where a sound is coming from - as do headphones - just not in Empyrion. Question: does the positional Audio work properly for anyone? I know for loads of us it's simply broken, but I wonder if it works for some hardware set-ups. I just have regular 2.1 Speaker - so Left / Right / Sub - nothing special. I've also used regular headphones which have the same issue. While my hardware supports it, I've never tried with 7.1 etc. sound. Note: I did tests on the audio and presented evidence (saves) where, for me, the audio was broken. The most readily noticeable one was how the audio for all base turrets originated from the CORE, not the turrets themselves. That was several years ago now, and I really don't pay attention to my own base's audio now.
That and the stark lack of other things to fight with our combat SVs and HVs. Other than the occasional base attack, you get to fight POIs with your fighters and hovertanks. That's it. You don't get to have awesome aerial dogfights or cat-and-mouse armored ground battles. There are no NPC SVs or HVs to fight. The drones and ground forces that you can fight are helpless against you. So you get to shoot at static turrets instead. Once they're dead, consensus is that you're supposed to get out and clear the place on foot. Your allotted time for using the war machines you spend days designing and decorating is now over. Now grab a rifle. It's time to play Guess What the POI Designer Is Thinking and burn though 300k worth of supplies and body armor for an hour. I have a better idea. I'm going to approach in my Silverback HV from behind a ridge, take out each turret as it appears, stay in blind spots. Then I'm going railgun holes into the walls for my drone to enter and look for the core. If I have to half level the place, fine. They're free to summon forces capable of stopping me if they want. I would love to have that fight, in fact. Send in the drones, the transports full of combat robots. Once the core is dead, I'm leaving. I don't care about loot. Plus it's a pain to get back inside the cockpit of one of these machines from the ground.
I walk in, use a T2/T3 assault rifle, and head shot everything. I rarely die in a POI unless it was due to my mistake (or the previously mentioned POIs with broken infinite spawners). Most NPCs don't even get a chance to turn around to get a shot off because they are dead before they "detect" me. Assault rifles will one or two shot all enemies if you hit them in the head, so you can clear an entire room without needing to reload. This is even easier if you're playing RE because the weapons are much better in that scenario many times. Of course some enemies are harder to head shot than others (abominations have a wonky animation).
Nope, NPC sounds seem to come form the player, but their footstep sounds are correct, I think. At the very least the attenuation and generally direction on footsteps is right. Many a times I have been saved by the pitter-patter of feet. That doesn't help with ranged attackers though. For reference I'm using a pair of Bose QC35 II connected via bluetooth. I get the same results if I output the sound through my monitor speakers, regardless of if I'm using Nvidias HD Audio or my motherboards IO. All are in stereo so can't really comment if full surround works better. It probably doesn't matter.
One of the unintended benefits of crouching. Moving slower changes the rate of your footsteps, allowing you to better hear those of approaching creatures. Doesn't do much for detecting a shotgunner Zirax behind a door, though.
Interesting. For me, footsteps seem to be coming from all around me, they're equally as directionless as the other sounds critters and the like make. I mean, I sometimes think they're behind me, as I can see there's nothing in front of me a lot of the time when outside for example. My motherboard has some sort of high-end audio on it (I forget what) and regular 2.1 speakers. However, every system I've played Empyrion on has had the same audio characteristics. However, they've all be stereo (either headphones or speakers) or Stereo plus sub. I also often suffer from "footstep lag" in that I move forward, stop for a moment to look around and then I hear some footsteps so assume something is near. However, it turns out to be my own footsteps, playing on some sort of delay. I.e. I move (footstep sound), I stop (no footstep sound) then while still stopped I hear footsteps again for a second, but there's nothing there. That one spooks me a bit lol. Bottom line, the audio desperately needs work and it'll make a huge difference when it does work.
@The Big Brzezinski - I agree. The game is begging for AI-Piloted HV's and SV's to challenge the lone player - and of course groups - I'd love to dog-fight in an SV, or tank it up in an HV vs. and AI. We gained AI-Controlled CV's on playfields and in space quite a while back now, and I thought SV's certainly were likely to be soon, with HV's taking a little longer due to the complications of ground travel and HV's somewhat janky physics. The only way to get such experiences currently is PvP multi-player and that can still have issues with performance.
The sound lag is noticeable (and often unnerving) for the player character, but I never really noticed it on NPCs. Even if the footstep sound are out of sync by a second or less you can use them to get a rough direction where an attacker is coming form. It doesn't give you much time but its better then nothing. How much lag are you getting? If its more then a second then your seeing something I'm not. Would be interesting to know if this is somehow hardware related. I completely agree that the audio needs work though.
It only appears to be my footsteps that lag. I.e. I think I've heard a critter, but it was my steps playing late. Literally, walk, stop, footstep sound plays. It doesn't happen all the time, which is why it can catch me out. Critter footsteps, from what I can tell, do play "live", but the sound is not directional. Sometimes it's better to turn the sound OFF than be misled from which direction a sound is coming from. I hope the audio work fixes this at a minimum. On top of that, making NPC's and critters aware of sound the player makes - so crouch / sneak and silenced weapons become a thing. I'd imagine certain critters in the wild would be naturally stealthy, for example. In addition to this, working on how sound is transmitted based on atmospheric density would be dead cool. Exploring a vented space wreck with only muted external sounds transmitted through your boots from the floor would be cool.
I finally got around to doing a little bit of testing in the current vanilla release and my findings are...weird. I spent some time in godmoding around a new survival game in Akua, following dinosaurs and have found that both their footsteps and ambient (grows/roars) are directional and have attenuation BUT the effect is very subtle. Way more subtle then one would expect and absolute more subtidal then most people would find useful for identifying attackers. Also the drop off seems to be very wrong. The attenuation is subtle until 30-40(?) meters then it falls off a cliff. Someone with more sensitive ears then me would have to test this to give a better explanation. Directional sound also only seems to work along the playfields length/width axis. So if you are above/below and looking toward/away from mobs, the sound seems to come for all around you instead of in front/behind you BUT attenuation still seems to work. The game doesn't seem to do true 3d sound. It just kind of sort of does 2d ish sound. Very weird. Mobs tested so far: Raptors and Parasoars. I may test others at some point when I get around to really playing again but that probably won't be until RE2 is released. Or maybe testing out whatever changes are pushed in the next major game update. If others could test and confirm/refute these finding it would be helpful. It may be that this is not a general problem with sound implementation but an issue with how individual mobs are setup. I will say that the base game environments are looking very pretty these day.
Yeah, the game looks great these days, but I just cannot get my head around the sound being wrong. Sound in games, even over regular stereo speakers / headphones, has been so good for so long now, that it's relatively easy (in most titles) to tell if something is to the left, right or behind you. Even going as far as to make sound from above or below you seem pretty well positioned. It's magic I tell you. Things that once required surround sound - i.e. speakers all around you - now work well enough on a cheap set of headphones. It's really very clever. In an old game like Skyrim, I don't think I'm ever confused as to where a sound is coming from, unless there are multiple sounds / other distracting sounds present. It's not perfect, but I NEVER hear a sound clearly coming from my left speaker, that's actually way off to my right, ten metres below me and much further away than the sound suggested like in Empyrion. Random aside: did you know, many humans have residual muscles to control ear movement? Even though we cannot do it now - outside a party-trick ear wiggle - researchers have wired up some of these people and observed these legacy muscles react, according to where a sound is coming from. The ear is trying to adjust to capture the sound more effectively...but the muscles are too atrophied to do anything, plus the ear structure is more ridged than it perhaps was in earlier human model lol.
Your ears can only detect whether a sound is stronger in your left or right ear. In order to derive useful information from game audio, a player needs to hear variance based on their relative position and heading to the source of a sound. If a footstep or bark starts playing, and stays at the same volume in each ear as you whip around trying to face it, the sound doesn't actually tell you anything useful. You'll know there's danger somewhere on your left or right side at the instant it started, and that's all.
That's not how sound works at all. You can absolutely hear the difference between sound that is in front and sound that is behind because sound that comes from behind has to pass through the cartilage of your ear instead of simply being funneled by it and that changes it the sounds characteristics. People who have good ears and/or training can even judge how far away a sound is coming form and from almost the exact direction with out seeing the source. I'm sure a sound engineer could do a better job of explain exactly what happens... This effect can easily be achieved with speakers/headphones by slight muffling sounds as the source mover further and further behind the listener. Other games, movies, and tv shows do this all the time and have been for years. Empyrion seems to do this as well. The problem is that the effect is too subtle to really pick up on unless your specifically listening for it and that it only sees to work on two axis's. Also it is not consistent. Bottom line is the game doesn't seem to be using true 3d sound but rather a hacky 2.5d implantation.
Unless you have a rather elaborate sound setup for your PC, you only have two speakers, usually in headphones. The sound can't come from in front or behind because you only have these two points of reference. Other games use clever audio coming from these two points of reference to simulate sounds coming from all sorts of places. Empyrion does not. As a result, Empyrion's combat suffers from an auditory uncanny valley. What you hear seems true, but you know it's wrong on a visceral level.
You are making things up from out of your head. Lol Plenty of headphones these days have multiple drivers per ear, for a full surround sound design. Others have software driven solutions for this. Speaker setups for surround sound aren't really that elaborate, but probably less common than people with decent headphones. The game itself doesn't need to do any of the tricks, it just needs to provide the correct output channels (5.1, 7.1, or some other proprietary designs) and the sound card drivers in Windows (or specifically for your setup, be it headphones or otherwise) will handle the rest.
