I would very much like to vent about the recent changes to Eve audio. I am not going to do that as I realize that I am not the only player and that everyone has different tastes. But for the love of God please lower the jump bridge volume. I have my environmental turned down so that I can barely hear it and still the JB sounds like my computer is exploding. If I use a headset for voice then I just have to turn audio off.

I enjoy the environmental sounds and very much miss them, please tell me that this is something that is going to be fixed.

sorry about this, but we just recently became aware of this.
It's not supposed to be louder and none positional in space. It may sound cool so loud the first time, but after 500 jumps, not so much - as someone pointed out at the audio roundtable at FF2013.

This will definitely be fixed for Odyssey.

Awesome TY. Sorry to be so grumpy in the OP, we were chasing a gang around Provi last night and I must have gone through 20 bridges in an hour +half. I really do like Eve sound, both the choices for background music and the environmental sounds. Although I am on the "bring back the JB bandwagon." At any rate I like to keep it on, so thanks for making it interesting.

With some of the new features coming for Odyssey, like the scanner and the crypto hacking sequence, you will be able to - just by listening - slightly be able to "before you click" decipher what is behind the various results.

Thanks.
we as a team and me as a designer are really working hard to get EVE back on the right audio track.
Too bad there isn't a recording of the roundtable, but let me go over a few of the things mentioned for our future plans.

CCP Baldur, the audio director, said that the JB ain't coming back and it's gone for good. The music in EVE is now system and danger specific. - the ability to turn off the music and play your own music in a seperate player or play the EVE music from our soundcloud page is the solution.

Playing without sound is always an option, but one of my personal goals will be to make EVE a game, where playing with sound will be an advantage. Not a disadvantage to turn it off, but with it on you will be able to get information that you otherwise would not have.

Personally I would like to make the game audio - AFK friendly. I'm not saying that I want people to play AFK necessarily, but I would like players to be able to walk away from the computer and then just by listening, be able to tell when they need to react or not and come back to the action.

With some of the new features coming for Odyssey, like the scanner and the crypto hacking sequence, you will be able to - just by listening - slightly be able to "before you click" decipher what is behind the various results.
Like with the scanner, you will be able to hoover over the results and hear a "distress" signal - very faint. but by knowing which of them is which, it will give you , maybe, just the help you need to not suddenly fly into a situation that you can't handle or perhaps into the situation that you specifically want.

The same with the hacking sequence. you can hoover the nodes and be able to tell what is under it.
which nodes, which scanner results that sound like what, you will have to figure out yourself.

But sound is becoming a tool. not just a luxury. it may take a while to get everything done, but for the future and every new feature coming, will have stuff like this in it.

and you are not grumpy. :) at least I didn't get the impression.

I've gotta say, I agree with Vera up there. Eve is one of the few games that doesn't force you to be able to hear well to play. I lost a lot of my hearing from a roadside bomb in Iraq, and it still amazes me how much you really depend on audio for subconscious clues and such.

CCP, I hope you can keep EVE "deaf friendly", while still giving cool new features.

Hey WhiteNoise, bit offtopic but;

Could you tell us more about the turret audio you're revamping again? Any hints?

"Nobody is playing EVE with sound enabled."
"Let's incentivize playing EVE with sound by giving some sort of in-game advantage."

perfectly logical right?

not really because this view ignores that people don't just turn sound off because the sound is useless (and I would rather watch & listen to a TV series rather than listen to useless sound) but that there are other reasons why people don't use sound.

* EVE has been a pretty deaf-friendly game so far. Once important information starts to get conveyed via sound only that will change (and cause problems for players who don't hear well or not at all).

* Multiboxing is a fact of life in EVE. The current sound system is blissfully unaware of the number of clients that are running on my computer. Good luck trying to run just 3-4 clients with sound enabled without losing your sanity...
It's certainly possible to design a sound system that would do well with multiboxing (and not descend into pandemonium by duplicating music, environment sounds, ... across clients) but I doubt we'll see any such thing in time for Odyssey.

* You never get the distance calculations right. I've been playing EVE for almost 5 years, I have tried countless variations of the sound system (turret effects seem to get changed every other patch) and I can't remember any time during which it was just fine.
Currently the assumption seems to be that all players play zoomed in at default camera settings. I can only speak for myself but my zoom level usually represents the range of my ship, if I fly a frigate I might be able to see a radius of 15km on my tactical overlay, if I fly a battleship I might see 50-70km radius, If I fly a sniping ship I zoom out so I can see ~150km radius.
The current system means that I have to trade situational awareness for sound - unless I am zoomed in so close that my battleship fills 3/4 of my screen I don't get any turret sounds at all (similar for environment sounds).
There have also been incarnations of the sound system that featured obnoxious "infinite" sound that didn't seem to depend on distance at all.
My hopes that you will ever be able to deliver a working system for scaling sound with distance are extremely slim.

Can we PLEASE get the titan bridge bug fixed as well? This has been ongoing for as long as I can remember, and many people have filed many bug reports about this problem, and yet nothing has been done for what's a pretty game-breaking defect.

I've gotta say, I agree with Vera up there. Eve is one of the few games that doesn't force you to be able to hear well to play. I lost a lot of my hearing from a roadside bomb in Iraq, and it still amazes me how much you really depend on audio for subconscious clues and such.

CCP, I hope you can keep EVE "deaf friendly", while still giving cool new features.

this is f*king amazing
i hope this comes true

not to my knowledge. we were informed about this just the other day.

Thanks.
we as a team and me as a designer are really working hard to get EVE back on the right audio track.
Too bad there isn't a recording of the roundtable, but let me go over a few of the things mentioned for our future plans.

Playing without sound is always an option, but one of my personal goals will be to make EVE a game, where playing with sound will be an advantage. Not a disadvantage to turn it off, but with it on you will be able to get information that you otherwise would not have.

Personally I would like to make the game audio - AFK friendly. I'm not saying that I want people to play AFK necessarily, but I would like players to be able to walk away from the computer and then just by listening, be able to tell when they need to react or not and come back to the action.

...Edited for space CFM .

I never said that.
EVE is still deaf friendly. what I am saying is that sound in EVE will be a "good thing" to have on instead of something people joke about or turn off because they see it as useless.
Having sound on should be an advantage and not a piece of something annoying. playing with sound off should be a choice to take, but have in mind that you then remove a layer of information.

the fact that some people are deaf and that some are blind, is really not something we can build a game around, we can take these individuals into our considerations about make our game friendly to them, but certainly that shouldn't ruin it for the majority of people who can hear and see perfectly well.

not to my knowledge. we were informed about this just the other day.

Very strange - there's been many many bug reports in-game and threads in the Issues forum for years on this issue, it's more or less the main reason why null people play with sound off alot of the time.

The explanations have been pretty spot on too - no distance on the sound (always full volume) and each additional jumper (titan or jump bridge, same problem) adds to the amplitude of the sound into complete distortion.

sorry about this, but we just recently became aware of this.
It's not supposed to be louder and none positional in space. It may sound cool so loud the first time, but after 500 jumps, not so much - as someone pointed out at the audio roundtable at FF2013.

This will definitely be fixed for Odyssey.

Thanks.
we as a team and me as a designer are really working hard to get EVE back on the right audio track.
Too bad there isn't a recording of the roundtable, but let me go over a few of the things mentioned for our future plans.

CCP Baldur, the audio director, said that the JB ain't coming back and it's gone for good. The music in EVE is now system and danger specific. - the ability to turn off the music and play your own music in a seperate player or play the EVE music from our soundcloud page is the solution.

Playing without sound is always an option, but one of my personal goals will be to make EVE a game, where playing with sound will be an advantage. Not a disadvantage to turn it off, but with it on you will be able to get information that you otherwise would not have.

Personally I would like to make the game audio - AFK friendly. I'm not saying that I want people to play AFK necessarily, but I would like players to be able to walk away from the computer and then just by listening, be able to tell when they need to react or not and come back to the action.

With some of the new features coming for Odyssey, like the scanner and the crypto hacking sequence, you will be able to - just by listening - slightly be able to "before you click" decipher what is behind the various results.
Like with the scanner, you will be able to hoover over the results and hear a "distress" signal - very faint. but by knowing which of them is which, it will give you , maybe, just the help you need to not suddenly fly into a situation that you can't handle or perhaps into the situation that you specifically want.

The same with the hacking sequence. you can hoover the nodes and be able to tell what is under it.
which nodes, which scanner results that sound like what, you will have to figure out yourself.

But sound is becoming a tool. not just a luxury. it may take a while to get everything done, but for the future and every new feature coming, will have stuff like this in it.

and you are not grumpy. :) at least I didn't get the impression.

The "EVE has sound?" meme is a meme because *competent* players turn it off. Players who actually fleet up and participate and create memes. We turn it off because *any* sound will disrupt fleets. We turn it off because so much of EVE works well as a passive game while you're doing something else, listening to something else, watching something else. And when we experiment to see "hmm, what's changed in the past 5 years since I turned the sound off?" we find it's grating and obnoxious after roughly 30 seconds.

Hiding critical information in sound is like hiding critical information in menus 4 levels deep. Actually, no, that's literally what it is. Making EVE require sound will be antagonizing your players who don't suck, who interact, who spend the most hours with the game.

Definatly please try to incorporate being able to manage seperate volumes of sound when everything is implimented. An example if there really is going to be subtle hints to hacking/scanning ect i'd rather have those turned up and then all the other 'rubbish' that doesn't affect my gameplay turned completly off. Another example would be having wold volume turned on so that I can hear stargate jumps and such but then docking up and not wanting to hear the unbearable station effects.

/P

GÖÑ

The "EVE has sound?" meme is a meme because *competent* players turn it off. Players who actually fleet up and participate and create memes. We turn it off because *any* sound will disrupt fleets. We turn it off because so much of EVE works well as a passive game while you're doing something else, listening to something else, watching something else. And when we experiment to see "hmm, what's changed in the past 5 years since I turned the sound off?" we find it's grating and obnoxious after roughly 30 seconds.

Hiding critical information in sound is like hiding critical information in menus 4 levels deep. Actually, no, that's literally what it is. Making EVE require sound will be antagonizing your players who don't suck, who interact, who spend the most hours with the game.

who said anything about hiding critical information? I only mentioned giving "hints" in the sound of what might come - you might as well play without the graphics then, in a text based universe if you really want to create your own stories.

you clearly didn't get my point.

my point is that it still won't be a disadvantage to turn it on, but a slight advantage to keep it on and that sound will give you better gameplay.

The "EVE has sound?" meme is a meme because *competent* players turn it off. Players who actually fleet up and participate and create memes. We turn it off because *any* sound will disrupt fleets. We turn it off because so much of EVE works well as a passive game while you're doing something else, listening to something else, watching something else. And when we experiment to see "hmm, what's changed in the past 5 years since I turned the sound off?" we find it's grating and obnoxious after roughly 30 seconds.

Hiding critical information in sound is like hiding critical information in menus 4 levels deep. Actually, no, that's literally what it is. Making EVE require sound will be antagonizing your players who don't suck, who interact, who spend the most hours with the game.

I think mkint's point is that *any* slight advantage of using sound by definition means that not using sound puts you at a disadvantage, when compared to those using sound. this is a PVP interactive game after all, so any advantage to one group disadvantages the other group as they are directly interacting.

Personally i'm cool with adding better sound stuff, but i understand where mkint is coming from also.

"Nobody is playing EVE with sound enabled."

Ninja bug report: When I disable sound in both clients and then later try to re-enable sound in one, it often does not work. The check-box is set, but the sound stays disabled.

I never said that.
EVE is still deaf friendly. what I am saying is that sound in EVE will be a "good thing" to have on instead of something people joke about or turn off because they see it as useless.
Having sound on should be an advantage and not a piece of something annoying. playing with sound off should be a choice to take, but have in mind that you then remove a layer of information.

the fact that some people are deaf and that some are blind, is really not something we can build a game around, we can take these individuals into our considerations about make our game friendly to them, but certainly that shouldn't ruin it for the majority of people who can hear and see perfectly well.

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect anything to be built around an "edge case" such as disability. CCP has always been great about presenting information via multiple senses. I don't know if that's been intentional or not, but it's a great way to have set up the game.

In fact, with the new chirps and beeps, a blind friend of mine has been able to get into EVE, so kudos for that one, sound team!

As long as you get the vital information across (which EVE does quite well), I'm all for you guys making any sorts of extras others can experience and have fun with. Hope you guys can dev up something cool, good luck!

The "EVE has sound?" meme is a meme because *competent* players turn it off. Players who actually fleet up and participate and create memes. We turn it off because *any* sound will disrupt fleets. We turn it off because so much of EVE works well as a passive game while you're doing something else, listening to something else, watching something else. And when we experiment to see "hmm, what's changed in the past 5 years since I turned the sound off?" we find it's grating and obnoxious after roughly 30 seconds.

Hiding critical information in sound is like hiding critical information in menus 4 levels deep. Actually, no, that's literally what it is. Making EVE require sound will be antagonizing your players who don't suck, who interact, who spend the most hours with the game.

Confirming this happens to me as well.

Another "speak for yourself". I play EVE for 10 years almost, I participate in fleets and I still use EVE sound when I fleet up.
If you can't handle sound and comms at the same time, it may be your personal problem.

There are sounds that tell you about certain events in game already. Low shields, low cap etc. If you chose to ignore this feature, it's your choice. Just don't brag about being more competent than people who like to use the tools they are given.

Same here, the impression I got was it's due to sharing the same client install. Restarting the client seems to bring it back.

who said anything about hiding critical information? I only mentioned giving "hints" in the sound of what might come - you might as well play without the graphics then, in a text based universe if you really want to create your own stories.

you clearly didn't get my point.

my point is that it still won't be a disadvantage to turn it on, but a slight advantage to keep it on and that sound will give you better gameplay.

I too wish that the volume of background noise in stations was independently adjustable from gates/wormholes/other world sounds. I often leave my client open for hours while I work on something else and the station noise is unbearable. And your sliders are still from 2003 so it is a fairly substantial PITA to adjust those levels. So I never have world sounds turn on, I am probably missing out on a bunch of them!

In the mind of CCP:

Give audio hint -> softly push players towards enabling sound (and reward those players who have learned to distinguish the hints).

In reality:

Odyssey includes audio hints -> activate sound -> "**** this ****" -> turn sound off and monitor active file handles to see what sound file the EVE client is playing on mouse-over, print the "hint" in big letters on my screen.

(yeah, the audio is probably all in one big resource file... I am too lazy to check and I don't care as it doesn't affect the point I am trying to make;

nope I am not telling you that you should violate the EULA I am saying that people will violate the EULA rather than use sound. Why? mostly because they are running several clients and using sound is completely unfeasible.)

you seem quite interested in the subject, for a person who doesn't care. :D

Personally I would like to make the game audio - AFK friendly. I'm not saying that I want people to play AFK necessarily, but I would like players to be able to walk away from the computer and then just by listening, be able to tell when they need to react or not and come back to the action.

You know what would be awesome. A sound that happens when somone enters local. Now this wouldn't be practical for hi-sec, but for low and null it would be very useful. Make it togable for when you want it to happen.

Though why I afk in low and null is beyond me.

BUT! here is the problem on our end, the audio engine and a few other things have some problems because of the old system, mixed with new systems, code wrappers and API's

The sound distance on the jump audio seems to be fixed somewhat, but what does that help when the camera now will auto-zoom in on the jump bridge and titan and put you at zero sound distance?

sorry about this, but we just recently became aware of this.
It's not supposed to be louder and none positional in space. It may sound cool so loud the first time, but after 500 jumps, not so much - as someone pointed out at the audio roundtable at FF2013.

This will definitely be fixed for Odyssey.

LOL that sounds about right

f'ing CCP you guys are like the stupid blonde chick that is so fun to f*ck you won't get rid of her but my god does she do some stupid sh!t sometimes

I still love you long time though

well, love you too. I guess.

one of the things here, is that this camera effect was not in effect whenever this was tested out, so we didn't know about it - so therefore of course we couldn't have known.

but if this is still broken, then it requires more testing - as it's supposed to be fixed. the sounds shouldn't stack and cause for distortion whenever several players are jumping. It could be a code issue, which I cannot fix myself - but it's on my fix list, but trust me, the "fix list" is pretty long already; since EVE and Audio have had it's problems over time and until now there hasn't been the manpower or will to fix a lot of this, which is what I am trying to do with the rest of the team.