Incredible timing! I actually decided to go ahead and just buy the Commander Pack last week despite not feeling that I all together like playing this game (a separate issue, only partly related to this topic). I am familiar with the series (I had played some of HttR) and it seems nothing has changed or updated as far as sound in this game goes. I actually Googled "command ops sound mod" and I didn't find this thread btw and just found it when I broswed here. I was already thinking of doing my own (yes probably using some of the sound mods from CM as welL!), so thanks for doing this!
Yes, unfortunately, unlike many other games, sound and sound cues in this game does not feature highly and are of low quality, fidelity and not very imaginative. That is a shame because sound in games really is an important part of communicating information about game events to the player. With this game it almost seems sound and how it can be used in the game was a after thought.
I understand that sound and this game are problematic, primarily because of the variable speed of the game. It is true that this game can sound like a cacophony especially at high game speeds.
A few ideas/suggestions of places where sound is not used in this game where i could:
- Issuing ordes/editing orders (perhaps even a radio crackle)
- confirmation when issuing Air Strike
- general background noise, not hearing anything at all is kind of bland.
- clicking on a unit could activate a small sound based on what it's doing (eg. a moving armored unit you might hear rumbling track sound). Yes I know if overdone it could get annoying.
- retreating units saying "pull back" or something similar
These are just ideas/concepts. Would be great to have sound feature more in this game to help the players situation awareness for what is going on.
Important things to consider are the length of the sound clips. Again because of the nature of the game, knowing where the battle sounds are coming from is a difficult thing for the game to communicate. If you are zoomed in to a section of the map on the screen and you hear a sound, it doesn't mean that the sound was generated by something currently displayed on your screen. Perhaps a distance dependent sound attenuation model could help here so that the loudest sounds are the ones generated by units appearing on screen and the sounds generated by units that are not visible on the screen are still audible but have progressively diminished volume the further away they are. Would also help reduce the cacophony affect.
It would be good to have different sounds based on different weapons/nations. Eg MG42 buzz saw for German MGs.
Anyway thanks, I will happily load your mods up and give them a go. The sad thing is that it really shouldn't be too hard to improve on the stock battle sounds in this game. Anything will probably be better than what the game comes with.
