Distorted audio in certain cases

[user1-github]

Game version: master build 766, Linux.

There are certain cases when game audio becomes heavily distorted. It happens particularly in closed areas (where there is this hallway sound effect) in combination with either low frequency sounds like explosions or shotgun shots or generally with a lot of noise in the background.

This can be easily reproduced in the map Tomb.

[q009]

This is a known problem with maps like Tomb and Station, where they have too many loud sounds.
@MirceaKitsune I'm assigning you to this

[MirceaKitsune]

Are you only getting the issue on my maps and ports? Meaning Atop, Station, Tomb, Space, or the new Cargo? EAX are a pain to tweak: Whenever I reduce the volume of sound entities, something changes and they sound loud again.

I swear Cargo-64 sounded right when I finished it three months ago, I try the same version last week and suddenly it's too loud! Just tried Tomb and now I hear the wind everywhere, which I know I didn't when I pushed the last version.

Are the engine tweaks to reverb and sound entities finally over so they won't get any louder? If so I'll have to update all my maps yet again just to fix this.

[user1-github]

It's not just on your maps. From my testing it can potentially happen on any map depending on the sound type (more with low frequency sounds), amount of sounds (larger amount of sounds will cause more distortion) and location (more in closed areas). For example, it's also very noticeable on the map Conquest. Note that I haven't thoroughly tested all of your maps, so maybe in some of them this issue isn't as noticeable.

But like you said, I've also noticed that with version master 766, there is this constant loud wind noise in Tomb, that probably contributes to the audio distortion. This wasn't the case when I tried the 2.0.9-9 Steam version earlier this year.

On an off-topic note, I've noticed that the map Station has severe fps drops when looking towards central areas of the map, as reported here.

[user1-github]

Btw, idk if that will help, but I thought maybe this issue has something to do with OpenAL? Because there were no distortion issues in older versions of Red Eclipse which didn't use OpenAL. I've also tried another game that uses OpenAL - RVGL, which also seems to have some audio distortion. Though in RVGL it only happens in very rare cases when there's an extremely large amount of sounds at the same time.

[MirceaKitsune]

Thanks for confirming. Am in the process of tweaking all my maps again to fix this: Using fade groups drastically reduces the loud noises, this seems to be a must as reverb makes everything extremely loud by default.