News - This Update Broke Warzone. Audio Changes
Premium gas
Yeah, but like Shifty said, it literally looks like you're walling when you're using it, so it's kind of like you're getting looked at from 80 meters away. Like, you can tell someone's game when they start, and when they hear something, you could tell people by the way they react. If you're reacting to me two, three buildings down, you got something that was the pulse.
Che podcast with a bunch of competitors determining what should be G or banned from competitive play, and the most premium gas my audio tune can get is getting GA by most of the top players in the game who also did their job. A little too well, by the way. Today's article is going to be short and straight to the point.
I'm just going to go over a couple of changes that they noted on the season 1 reloaded patch notes after that nightmarish, update as well as talk about the plans with the tune moving forward and kind of describe the tune for yall because there's a lot of misinformation going around.
Audio changes!
That may have been one of the roughest war zone updates, but between a couple of the games that I did manage to get in through all of the bugginess yesterday and some of the games that I played offline today. You'll have a three- or four-stack hit-a-zip on the map landing on you, and you don't hear anything until you're getting shot in the back, so I will be really interested to see what updates they bring to this in the future.
The first point that they make here is about audio occlusion. If you don't remember from previous articles, audio occlusion is how a sound, or how much of a sound, transfers through or around an object on the map, whether that's a plywood wall or several floors of a brick building. What do they say here?
Buildings will get better, and people around walls will get better under bridges. Those kinds of things will improve as they fix map exploits, and they just do a fine pass of the map. The next thing that they note that they have changed is the plane audio, and I definitely noticed this both with stock audio and my audio tune when you're infilling into a match.
I mean, most of the time I have this muted anyway, but it is nice that they are paying attention to those kinds of comfort sounds because if you're playing for a long time, you hear that a lot, and it is one of the loudest sounds. I also think that the planes that drop loadouts in the game and the planes that drop cash drops in the game have also been made a little bit quieter, especially with the audio tune.
That's something that has been loud in the past. The next point is about music. I muted all of that, so I don't really care. The final note that they make is about allied sounds or friendly sounds. They've reduced the volume. They say a friendly slide jumps and lands to better distinguish between friendly and enemy behavior, and in the limited amount of testing that I had, I noticed a big difference.
It's not something I can really tell by watching other streams, but it seems that the quality of friendly sounds is thinner, meaning it lacks a lot of the base that enemy footsteps do, and I think that's a really fair balance. I don't think you should not hear your teammates, but I do think it is good to clearly be able to tell when it's an enemy and when it's a teammate, and this slight distinction. I think, should help a lot with giving a little bit of time to adjust to it.
Surround sound
There have also been a lot of questions, and I think there are misconceptions or just a general misunderstanding of how this whole audio tune works. The whole strength of it is that you have a device that is configured as a 7.1 surround sound device.
What this ultimately does is lead the game's sound engine to produce a less crowded mix. I started doing some really deep dive audio research, and this's this thing called relative dynamics, long story short. Audio cues, when produced procedurally by the game engine, can step on and get in front of each other and mask each other, and I think that's a big problem with what's happening, so we can get around that.
Now I could tell you all to buy a piece of hardware, which I am researching. I have found an ampda alternative. That is true, 7.1. Now some people have motherboards. Some people have dacks that are capable of that; it all kind of varies. I have bought four or five different types of dacks to try to find one that really works for 7.1.
And it's a mixed bag, so the most consistent way to do this for everyone is with a virtual cable, as you see here and as we did in the original article. That is a key component. Another component is having a loudness EQ on it. For some reason, in Call of Duty and a lot of FPS shooters, this dynamic compressor's loudness EQ is It works incredibly well, so that is really the strength of it.
You could achieve similar results by having a 7.1 surround sound device like an AV receiver. If you were a theater nerd or a DAC, there's all kinds of gamer headsets that have software that supposes they do it. The problem is, does it really integrate with Call of Duty? Again, my goal was to produce this for everybody, so we found another open-source tool.
Hui Just so happens to decode surround sound from the Hi-Fi Cable in a way that benefits us competitively. By turning down the front channel, you're able to mask or turn down your gunshots and declutter the audio mix. It's super strong to hear people run up on you through steps on top of a building or a ladder while you're on a rooftop.
Now a note about the front channel I've seen people say that watching people's streams with this sounds terrible. There are options. Seven is simply the most powerful broken level, if you wanted to run this at 100. That would be better than running stereo in the game while you'll still hear your footsteps and your gunshots.
The amount of audio cues and the amount of space created in the mix, and the things you don't miss if you're running this 7.1, cable is really, really op in the game stack that with loudness EQ and you're hearing pretty much everything now turning down the front channel allows us to cheese it, of course, but if you're worried about your viewer experience and you're a content creator by all means, continue to use the tune.
Just adjust that front channel up until you find a balance between what the chat or your viewers enjoy and what helps you competitively. Where does Suvi run it? It's simply a configuration. It's a set of settings that are saved to this line item here in equalizer APO, now.
Apo
Adds audio processing objects APO, which is a Windows thing to Windows; in fact, your motherboard does that when you go to the device and you choose to enable or disable audio enhancements; all of those are usually like karaoke.
