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Can the devs please explain this? This is genuinely insane.
Patchnotes,today:
Fixed an issue that caused the Huntress Inhuman Brute cosmetic sounds to be too low.
Developer note,over two years ago:
We’ve seen some feedback concerning the volume of certain Survivors
compared to others, causing this perk to be less effective on Survivors
with louder grunts of pain. In a future update, we’ll be reviewing the
volume levels of each Survivor’s grunts to ensure that each of them can
make use of this perk.
It's not hard. You have proven this. Why is this still not implemented. Is it really that hard to take a few hours out of making the store and skins prettier to equalize the audio in Audacity/Audition?
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I'm really hoping we get a good reason explaining this besides just.. "backlog"… This is a pretty important change.
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can only share their answer from the Reddit AMA
Q: Are the levels of injured sounds and panting survivors emmit gonna be normalized soon? Different characters currently get vastly different outcomes on mindgames depending on who they are because of audio, ultimately pushing players towards certain few characters. Signed: An Ash and Jeff enjoyer
A: We are very aware of this concern! We've investigated this recently and discovered it isn't quite as straightforward as we hoped, but putting on our detective hats and digging into it further. -Mike
I guess it’s easier to get two (or three counting Huntress, Baba Yaga, Were-Elk) sounds to a same-y level than all of the survivor sounds (which are plenty of different survivors plus plenty of different sounds - normal breathing, injured, infected, sprinting, crouching, locker, etc pp)2 -
The only sounds they need to change is the injured moans and they just need to stabilize them TO A GIVEN VOLUME. That is OBJECTIVELY not hard. Locker/crouching is also not a different sound. It's a loudness modifier.
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even then they have different injured sounds not only one per survivor. And again, plenty of survivors to adjust - also including licensed ones which may need to be approved by the license holders (though maybe not as balance changes should be possible without approving but we don’t know exactly)
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What's up with this apologism? It's been years. Yeah there's a lot of different sounds. So what? It's trivial to fix individually. My knowledge of audio editing is pretty low and I could knock it out in a couple afternoons. I'm certain someone smarter than me could do it in batches. I'm also certain there are people smarter than me working at behavior interactive.
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You're vastly overstating how difficult it is to edit audio files. I've done it plenty. You could teach a person with ZERO knowledge prior to do it efficiently in sub 1,5h.
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I am not apologizing for the devs. I am just trying to look at it reasonably.
I don’t think it’s as easy and trivial as you all make it out to be though. Still no an excuse for BHVR for taking so long (I never said it’s okay after stating they will do it) but jeez… why can’t people voice their feedback somewhat reasonably instead of getting insulting..
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will also leave this here from another thread.
I do think people are downplaying and simplifying issues they don’t truly grasp themselves. These kinda adjustments can easily result in distorted sounds and there is also a subjective layer to all of it (eg higher voices being easier to notice than deeper ones)
Again, not apologizing but looking at it a little bit more reasonable and not acting like a toddler would be able to do it better and faster than the devs.
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The person you're quoting is trying to make it seem complicated by over explaining. It is literally just that easy. You turn down the volume levels. I worked in radio briefly and I never had to worry about the audio ghost collapsing waveforms on copy I voiced. If something is too high, you turn it down. If it's too low you can turn it up to a reasonable degree without degrading the quality. I don't think any survivor needs to have their grunts of pain blasting in your ear so that's not really a concern.
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We are NOT adjusting volumes by amounts that ever would remotely distort the sound. You already hear the level "distortion" that would occur in game when you have IW and you crouch or sit in a locker. There is nothing. This just doesn't apply here.
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yeah. Either they are making it seem too complicated or someone else is making it seem too easy.
keep in mind that the sounds in this game are very prone to issues and bugs, and there is on top of these adjustments also perks/other features influencing them.I don’t think it’s as complicated as the devs say and warrants a much time as they take (if they even work on it anymore)
But.. I also don’t think it’s as simple as you try to make it out to be with all the variables… also especially considering how the community always try to talk the devs down and make it seem like everything is so ez
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To be clear I dont think working on anything code wise in this mess of a game is easy - this specifically is REALLY easy. Not mentioning anything else about the game.
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I honestly believe that it's a mix of extreme spaghetti code and perks that can influence sounds that make it harder than it should be.
Let's not forget that the latest update broke the whole game for a while and caused seizure-inducing lights in basement even if nothing in the update was related to the basement.
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There is much more that goes into it than you know. Survivors have hundreds of different audio logs at different volumes that are interwoven into the games coding and a simple increase volume is not feasible. The Huntress/ killers are an exception because the unique skin has its own very small set of audio logs and is built off of newer easier to change coding. Granted I think two years is plenty of time lol but im saying it is FACTUALLY NOT easy.
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even if nothing in the update was related to the basement
To be fair, last update included the upgrade from Unreal Engine 4 to 5 so that definitely was related to the basement. And lights. And the whole game.
(again, no excuse or apologizing for this, just explanation)0 -
Yeah, and the rubberbanding & lag was an understandable consequence of that, but the lights specifically in basement?
Hell, it's been months and Nemesis (not that he's really worth playing at a high level since 7.5.0, like most weaker/M1 Killers) still have his tier-up tentacle animation messed up despite not being touched in the update.
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I have learned more on this subject, and that is factually incorrect. After you have processed an audio singal, you can raise the volume, but you can't raise the volume of the raw audio signal without distorting the waveform. A low input volume is effectively a low resolution, so when you scale that low resolution signal you get a lower quality sound.
In order to fix this issue I believe BHVR would have to modify the volume of the playback audio for that sound specifically, which would have to be in the code of the game.
As I stated, I'm not an audio engineer so I don't have the expertise to answer this question to a satisfying degree, but I know enough to know it isn't as simple as what you are saying...
I'm not claiming to know better, cause I don't... and I'd be more than happy for someone to explain why raising an input singal and an output signal is different (if it even is...). I'd love to know why I'm wrong, because I'm still grappling with understanding a lot of these concepts myself and would be keen for someone to explain it to me in a manner I can understand.
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yes. Literally everything. Not only movement/lag/rubberbanding. The whole engine got upgraded.
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If you're grappling with it download an audio editing program of your choice, record yourself saying something and then lower the volume on it. You can do this yourself in five minutes. You will not experience a degradation in quality.
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okay, I know for a fact that it’s not that easy, as I literally did this for a recording that I made for a gift. Different sessions, though while same setup I used different volume settings for my mic accidentally and tried to level them all to the same volume.
I got it done in a quality that sufficed my needs - but there was noticeable quality differences.
though I do expect the devs working on sounds have more experience than me, make higher quality recordings obviously and use better software… this is already telling me it’s not as easy as you try to make it sound. Thanks for confirming.1 -
It is the same effect lowering audio as well, but instead of stretching the audio signal, you are squashing the audio signal, so you are still reducing the audio quality. This is a question of producing a professional level audio file, not a fan made mod. There is less tolerance for subpar work in a professional capacity.
As I stated already, you can try it your way and see if you get away with it. You might be lucky and it'll be fine, I never said it wasn't possible to do it and get away with it. In my original post, and the follow up above, I was stating fact, that modifying an audio signal in the way you're proposing will reduce the audio quality. Whether or not it is human detectable or not is a different question.
All I know is that BHVR have tried it already, and they stated it was more complicated than it seemed at first, and this was me offering what I can as an explanation why. I ask you, if it was so simple, why wasn't it done? It'd take less than a day for 1 engineer to do it, so why wasn't it done and instead they opted to invite this very backlash and criticism?
So as I've said numerous times, people like you may be right, maybe it is as simple as you say and they could have balanced the audio without any noticeable distortion. However I have shared a little bit more insight into the finer details of audio processing to challenge the uninformed statement that "its as easy as opening up the audio file in audacity and turning up the volume".
Professional audio processing is not that simple, and from.my limited understanding, it depends how much BHVR have to modify the input signal as to how feasible this solution is.
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The problem of low volume in Huntress is corrected in less than a month, but the problem of low volume in Ada is left unresolved for over a year. Is it allowed because it is only one killer player who suffers from the glitch? Or is it a non-issue because the survivor is getting away with it?
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I suppose an easy way to explain it, increasing/decreasing volume on a raw audio signal is the same thing as taking a picture and trying to make it larger or smaller.
You might successfully increase or decrease the size of the image, but you haven't improved the resolution, so certain things come out looking pixilated or truncated.
If you're only doing a small change, you might get away with it, but the bigger the change the more the image gets butchered.
It's the same thing for audio, at least that's kinda how I understand it as a layman.
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Babes,the survivors have been left with a nerfed iron will that on half the survivors does nothing because they're so loud. Please stop with the conspiracy posting…
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Not surprised if equalizing the sound volume would break something else instead.
I've had a sound bug where I can't hear sounds behind me on and off for a few months. It comes back for one patch before bugging out for the next. Sound has always been broken in dbd
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This is actually true and quite a good analogy, but you yourself could see, that raising volume (making picture larger) is vastly different from lowering the volume (making picture smaller). You can easily reduce volume without creating noticeable artefacts (like for Jeff), but you might get noise if you try to raise it too much in source file (Ada).
And as for the implementation - the easiest thing you can do is direct boost/lowering voice and that's good enough so long as you test it with your ears. Changing volume is as easy as decoding the source file (which is basically unziping - it's not zip file, but something more suited for sounds) which results is a "stream" of fractional numbers between 0 and 1. If you multiply them by 2 - you effectively doubled volume (energy-wise) - you would need to remove everything which gets you above 1 (hence some distortion), but it works. But lowering volume? You just divide everything by 2 and voala - you just effectively lowered volumes. Nothing hard really and especially lowering volumes have hard time in distorting the sounds (it is possible - computers can't precisely store numbers - so if you lower the sound by 0.000001% million times then you get distortions out of it) - but if you do 1-time correction (ideally keeping a safe copy of your source sounds) there's no way it would be noticeable in case of dampening sounds.
All you need to take into account is unzipping (you already have this as this is how every computer plays sounds), multiplying/dividing by your specified number, make sure they are within limits (0, 1) and zip them back in (this can be even done by audio converter online - there is even uncompressed format "wav" that you can construct yourself easily and convert that to your desired format).
There are audio programs that do these things better (converting files on their own, they understand human ear and the fact that you "feel" different volume in lower frequencies and in higher frequencies, better filtering of the resulting numbers after multiplications and so on and so forth) but really - this is just extra stuff and extra complications. You can do it like I wrote (with correction from someone listening to the sounds) and the end result will be quite similar. And it will not take you that much time. BHVR is either trying to overcomplicate it (like create tooling that can equalize all the stuff on the fly & precisely measure volume perceived by human and adjusting resulting sounds by different metrics/frequencies and so on), or they just don't care. I presume it's the 2nd thing though even if both are possible.
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Might be an unpopular opinion but I'm perfectly fine with the survivors having some variation in their audio levels. It makes them feel more unique and adds variety to them.
Also I feel like if BHVR tried to equalize the sounds they would mess it up so that some survivors would sound way to quiet for what the sfx is, ruining the immersion. I would especially hate it if this happened to one of the few survivors I play.
Given how often BHVR messes things up when trying to do fixes/adjustments, I'd rather them just leave survivors as they are then potentially having survivors sound levels feeling off.3 -
Nice to finally get a well reasoned and informed response in this debate rather than every point I'm making being ignored and just being told I'm wrong without any audio processing understanding or investigation to back it up. Massive thanks for that 🤘
You're likely spot on, at the end of the day when it comes to audio engineering, a quote I can cite from my audio engineer colleagues is "if it sounds good, it is good"... basically even if it isn't technically correct, it doesn't matter if it achieves what it needs to achieve.
So I doubt its as impossible as BHVR make it out to be, but... just to be fair, its not quite as simple as people make it out to be either. 😏
Post edited by UndeddJester on1 -
Hi all!
Probably pointless to dredge this up as likely no one other than me actually cares, but in the spirit of ensuring I'm not passing misinformation, I've continued developing my skills on my audio digital processing journey as part of my work, and do have a much better understanding of it than I did before... so I thought I would share for anyone interested.So regarding opening up a quiet audio file and increasing the gain of the audio signal, the simple up front answer is this is a perfectly valid approach to resolving the issue of quiet audio on most cases, and given the resolution of audio files, most audio files can be scaled quite substantially without any noticeable issues with distortion or artefacts.
The amplitude of the signal goes between 1 and -1, and an audio signal in essense defines the position of the speaker at a particular point in time during playback, in order to produce a sound. When adding gain, a signal that has a particularly sharp peak can hit issues when the peak goes over the limit, which then requires normalising or clamping the signal. This is obviously where the most pronounced issues in audio processing occur.
There is also gain sequencing, which refers to where in the audio pipeline gain is applied.
Part of audio processing pipieline takes the audio input signal, applies param EQ, compression and a limiter to the signal, all of which I only have a high level understanding of, but to give the idea:
- Parametric Equalising changes the volumes of different frequencies to balance the sound, effectively the balance of your treble and bass for the medium you're listening in.
- Compression will reduce the dynamic range of the signal, reducing the difference between the loud and soft sounds to make the audio have a more consistent (and usually more pleasant to listen to) sound.
- A limiter effectively caps the signal with the range, and basically ensures the signal fits within the desired range of the output speakers. You can make a softer limiter to smooth the cut off of the signal, or you can just hard stop a signal over the range. The compressor is a type of limiter, but is more of an artistic clamping of a sound, vs. the limiter which is more a technical make is work within this range change.
Alot of this stuff is feel and experience rather than exact science; and listening to an audio engineer talk about this stuff can be easily summed up as "applying the voodoo".
Regarding the debate in this thread, one thing to bear in mind is the order of operations. If you apply a gain before all these processing steps (the equivalent of applying our gain to the raw audio file in audacity), this changes the equaliser, compression and limiter behaviour away from what it was before. It is most likely fine still, but it will be different to what would be produced from the original signal applying these effects, and then applying the gain post processing.
So the TLDR version, it is very likely that simply boosting the gain in audacity would produce a result that is certainly good enough for DBDs needs... and we're talking differences that would be quite unlikely to be human detectable, let alone noticably worse in quality.
So as to why it hasn't been done, I honestly can't say... but its been interesting to learn about 😁🤘
Have a good one!
Post edited by UndeddJester on2 -
There ya go. You figured it out. I meant to do an audio comparison thing but I'm too lazy. Good legwork!
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