When adding sound to your game, how do you know how loud it will sound on other machines?
For example, someone balances sound for their game when their speakers are set to 10%, then someone plays the game with their speakers set to 60% by default, and gets extremely blasted with sound.
Or the other way, someone balances their game with their speakers set to 90% and then someone plays the game with the speakers set to 50%, and are unable to turn up the volume very much.
There’s also other factors such as the the volume set for the speakers in the computer, the volume physically set on the speakers, and the volume level of the game itself.
I live by the rule that the audio levels are up to the player. As a player, if a game is loud by default I’ll turn it down and if it’s soft I’ll turn it up. Better too loud than too soft, as you can always turn sound down more, but you may not be able to turn it up over the max levels of a system.
If one track sounds more loud than the other on same volume then you have to limit/compress the audio yourself. With limiting you make sure audio doesn’t go over x db. Compression basically boosts volume when volume is under a certain threshold. Apply it wrong and it sounds like your ears are getting decompressed. The goal is that all your audio has a certain standard so things dont sound ‘off’. You can hear this often in amateur youtube video’s, every video you click has different volume because nobody cared about the audio. If you apply this correct then all your audio volume sounds about the same,however every track is different so there isn’t a one solution fits all.
i always wondered that too…
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and how do you even know how it really sounds??
all my speakers and headphones always makes everything sound different…
lol i made a song for a flash game, for a contest once. and it sounded fine on my headphones…
and when i listened to it like a month later on diff headphones… i was like DAAAANNNGGG no wonder i lost lool it was all screechy… … and some stab soundFX sounded more like an explosion lool
if you want to really know how it sounds, listen to it with good monitors in an anechoic chamber. If it sounds different on all of your devices, you can’t make it sound the exact same to everybody. Every par of headphones has a different frequency response. So does every speaker. With music, they mix to the sound of a near-field speaker with as flat a response curve as possible. That sets a baseline for what it should sound like which people then deviate from.
It should be the same volume as anything else. I’m not an audio guy so I don’t know the terminology, but I think it roughly works out that the loudest stuff in your game should be full gain/volume, and everything else should be balanced relative to that. So if someone plays your game the loudest stuff should be roughly as loud as anything else they play audio wise.
As you switch from one game/movie/song/etc. to another you shouldn’t have to adjust the volume to keep listening levels comfortable.
As rab236 point out due to various frequency response of speaker it can be difficult to find a work for everything solution.
Volume ( or level /gain ) of a sound is one things, but you have also their own spectrum , mean some sound can at equal volume cover some other because of their dynamic in some part of frequency.
if you grab some sound or music from various site etc , they already can be mixed in a not really neutral way which can make things harder.
Anyway what you can do first is for all of your sound try to normalize them ( reach close to 0db numeric ) , you can do that with free soft like Audacity for example.
That will give you already a starting point.
Compression doesn’t influence level but just reduce the dynamic range of a sound which translate for our brain as louder sound ( ask yourself why advertisement / publicity at TV always seem to sound louder even if you did not raise up your volume ).
Using it can help make a sound really pop from other even if you already at high gain.
Speaker with flat frequency response are best to balance but i guess they are kind of costly and depending of your room it may not really give you a big benefit , at least not if you were using them in room with good acoustic for that purpose.
then you have this god damn “Super Bass” or whatever on some system which will ruin your work anyway ^^…
angrypenguin made a good remark , as choose your louder sound first , then mix the other in a substractive way.
A bit like you do for live , put everything at max gain , then you balance by reducing what need to be.
I do believe the audio mixer and some of the new stuff regarding audio in U5 should make this work relatively more easier
