ZDoom

They're all details either added in later games or by an old Carmack interview.

[quote="XLightningStormL"]I'm not interesting in the argument for why that "shouldn't exist" because muh realism or whatever (we're talking about a sourceport for a game where a Polish Catholic 20-something year old virgin beat his CO into a fullbody cast, survived a demon invasion (whilst also entirely destroying the demons), got blessed by the Angel of Death, and a free power armoured suit from a demon traitor (or at the least blessed a UAC power armoured suit to absorb demon magicka energy) and hasn't died yet) Plus the circular ambient sound object already full-fills that effect.[/quote]
Uh... what?

No one was making an argument about realism or whatever. Also - I hate to burst your bubble, but you did not describe the canonical DoomGuy - the character was intentionally left open-ended for a reason, and it's been specifically stated by one of the developers that DoomGuy is supposed to be "you" (i.e. the player in front of the keyboard). If imagining him this way makes you enjoy the game more - more power to you.

If this was an attempt on your part to troll, then consider yourself warned.

Expansion of the proposal:

Allow that it also doesn't have that "player is facing towards it" effect, or at least replace the distance multiplier for the "Square 'radius' Mood Sound Object" with an option to disable that.

I'm not interesting in the argument for why that "shouldn't exist" because muh realism or whatever (we're talking about a sourceport for a game where a Polish Catholic 20-something year old virgin beat his CO into a fullbody cast, survived a demon invasion (whilst also entirely destroying the demons), got blessed by the Angel of Death, and a free power armoured suit from a demon traitor (or at the least blessed a UAC power armoured suit to absorb demon magicka energy) and hasn't died yet) Plus the circular ambient sound object already full-fills that effect.

For "area" sounds that get a radius, the higher level engine is responsible for keeping the sound on the listener/player position when within the area, whatever the shape of that area is. When you leave the area, it places the sound at the closest point to the listener. That's how it works for sector sounds, like lifts and such. On top of that, OpenAL Soft applies a volumetric radius property for area sounds, to give the perception of a bit more "depth" (it's a cheap trick for a single sound input, but somewhat effective in lieu of separating the original sound's components and spacing them out around the desired area).

Yeah Cali is right - the sound and physics have nothing to do with each other at all. Sound is even handled by a library which does falloff and positioning on its own - so I have no idea how tenable an idea such as this would be. It ultimately would be up to someone who is very familiar with the OpenAL system to do this.

While your suggestion is worthwhile, I'd like to point out that [i]all[/i] objects in Doom have a square "radius" and the physics engine has absolutely nothing to do with the sound engine, and so shouldn't be used as an indicator of how difficult the feature implementation will be.

This wouldn't be a new "thing" either, I don't think. The more flexible solution would be additional falloff / attenuation formulas in SNDINFO that can be defined per-sound.

8-)

One of the biggest issues with ambient sounds is that there's no option for a "square" ambient sound, something that would allow for cleanly proportioning sounds accurately rather than dealing with the finnicky "circular" radius system.

Surely there shouldn't be too much of an issue, considering IIRC things like the Bridge actor use a square radius.

[b]Example[/b]: Circular Radius ambient sounds are more finicky, and less precise, due to their nature (being circles) which can cause either audio bleed out, or "deaf-spots" in the ambient sound distribution. Separate Square Ambient Sound actors allow for the original ambient sounds to remain untouched, whilst allowing for more flexibility, and precise ambient sound distribution for level designers.

[b]Proposal[/b]: New "Custom Ambient Sound" Actor using a Square-radius instead of a circular one.
[b]Benefits[/b]: Cleaner use of ambient sounds preventing area-sound leak/"deafspots". Mood sound effects are a lot easier. Less ACS work.
[b]Issues[/b]: Engine may not support it enough; too much work for developers (and not worth the risk)