I'm yet to play a game that truly gets the FPS weapon audio correct. The sound you hear when firing a weapon in very different to the sound you hear standing close to it or especially being down range from it. Firing a rifle for example, where your head is millimetres from or actually touching the body of the rifle, you hear only a fraction of bang and crack of the round and gas leaving the weapon. You hear the bolt and firing mechanisms moving inside the weapon, the rounds being ejected and picked up and more than anything you are aware of your own breathing. I'm yet to play a game that gets this right. Battlefield 4s' audio is very good at recreating the sound of effective fire. You can clearly hear the difference between the general gunfire all around and those rounds which are coming at you. As a general rule general rule if you hear the crack get your head down, if you hear the boom then get your belt buckle on the ground!

Just ordered a DSS2! I'm terribly excited...

£30 quids from CeX, don't know if it includes an optical cable, I've emailed them.

Bojangles wrote:

if you hear the boom then get your belt buckle on the ground!

You mean drop your pants?  Is the boom explosive diarrhoea?

Man I was loving The Last of Us I got about 3 hours in and it is a sublime audio aesthetic.  I even had the 2 sound designers that work with me play it for a day for reference. But as it's getting a PS4 makeover I can't help but put it on hold in order to play the uber quality version. Apparently it's getting some audio loving, can't wait.

@Skerret I meant that from the demos I played (low bit rate stuff online) it didn't sound great, I'm sure it sounds better in realtime but I know there's no holy grail for 3D audio for 2 speakers/headphones.

@bojangles yea I know why you mean, gun audio is extremely difficult to make good.  It's easy to make things loud but you can just turn very everything up, you need dynamic range in order to appreciate the quiet and loud moments.  HDR audio lets us have those loud and quiet moments while maintaining a consistent convenient listening volume for living room/headphones.  Ever watched a dvd and needed to turn the volume up for all the dialogue but down for all the action?  Most films are mixed for cinema where the volume is high, there are no neighbours and little background noise. Sadly for most at home watching a feature like Tron Legacy (for example) involves riding the levels!  HDR allows us to reduce that need, but it doesn't allow us to feel like we are firing the gun with the stock against our cheek.

I've fired lots of guns and recorded loads too, it's a learning experience with no hard rules.  1/3 of the mics I use for a weapon recording session capture useless rubbish, another 1/3 is good useable material, the final 1/3 is gold.  Maybe it's less than a 1/3 that is gold actually, point is it's very difficult to know what will and won't work, and how they can be combined in post to produce a satisfying gun sound.

Mic theory says you should use your highest SPL mics for very close recordings like 1m, 50cm of even attached to the gun. Or the shooter lapel style.  A variety of mid spl omnis and fun mics make up the mud range, when I say fun mics I mean handheld recorders like an olympus ls5 or camcorders with built in mics, they give auto gain compensation settings that give an amazingly fat result like we are used to hearing on documentary footage. They work great on guns.

For further away a combination of shotgun mic'd and omnis, depending if you want a more directional focussed distant firing sound, or if you'd prefer the more open sound of some omnis with more of the environment.

For a well balanced 1st person experience all those elements have to be well balanced, and as you say not many get it right.  Usually there's too much distance between where the source should be and where the gun SOUNDS like its coming from.  I.e. It's supposed to be 1st person 0 distance iron sights, but actually it sounds 3 meters away. Or when you aren't iron sighting it should very close but sound games put it at 10-15ft. Purely because of the source available to them.

Another totally excellent post there Billy, thanks again! Meant to reply an age ago, but I've been under an avalanche of coursework, dug myself out now thankfully. Now I can start work on building up a portfolio and honing me audio design skillz.

Oooerr just randomly came across this when reading stuff related to one of my fave VSTs, Slick HDR -

http://designingsound.org/2013/06/finding-your-way-with-high-dynamic-range-audio-in-wwise/

Not read it fully yet, looks interesting.

To be fair I wouldn't do it if the game I'm working on wasn't cool

Since buying that Zoom H1 I've a new respect for the fuckers that get ambient audio for films. I've been going out and setting it up for half an hour in various places. City noise is easy enough but wind though trees or waves against the beach and there's always some cunt making a noise somewhere. A plane, a car, a fucking lawnmover two miles away that you're hoping it won't pick up or some twat blasting out "I Predict a Riot" from the Glastonbury coverage.

Fucking dogs are the worst.

Fair.

I'll keep my head down.

I'll come up trumps.

http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=131482

I've got frightradar24 because I take the littleun to the airport for picnics. I live near an airport so planes are going to be fairly constant. I go to Wales regularly though so I should be set.

Really enjoying this though.

Sweet, I'm really looking forward to hearing stuff built with that!