What's wrong with the Vanilla weapon sounds?
Everything :P
Ever get a little put off by the sound of the Gatling Laser? Did you think it was odd that you heard bullets being shot as you approached the Cambridge Police Station, but then when you got close Danse's laser suddenly started going PewPew instead of BangBang?
I'll expand this article soonish, but for now, thought folks might be curious. Even if you have no sound experience, you can tell SOMETHING just ain't right with a lot of the sounds, yeah?
Here's the short version: none of the vanilla weapons, and I mean NONE OF THEM, have an "outdoor echo" sound that is derived from their actual shooting sound. This rolling echo you hear when outside is referred to as a Reverb Tail... or Trails, depends who you ask. It's the sound that trails off echoing in the distance, the tail end of the sound. And all of them are based on... THE SAME SOUND FILE. Dun dun dunnnn. So if you go outside and fire a Gatling Laser or a Laser Rifle or a Plasma Pistol or a Combat Rifle... they all make the same rolling echo! Which makes, of course
NO DAMN SENSE.
What's worse is that many if not most modders, adding their custom weapons, included their own shooty sounds for their creations. Great! Except the Reverb system can be a bit intimidating... not to mention time-consuming. And you have to dive pretty deep to discover what was going on which is why it took me 5+ years of on-and-off poking around to figure it out :P and long story long, 92.7 percent of all custom weapons have their sounds partially smothered by the Bethesda Bang reverb... all playing the echoes of the same freakin' rifle shot I found in the files.
The only solution is to generate your own sounds for all the reverb layers. It takes a WHILE. And a decent ear for fiddlin' and guesstimatin' what the weapon should sound like in five different variations of "small enclosed spaces" up to "huge honking caverns."
Stay tuned for more improvements to this mod, as well as many other weapons I can find the time to fix, including my pet peeve the Gatling Laser which sounds like a freaking gunpowder factory on fire and not an energy weapon :P
This is why even good energy-weapon sound replacers can sound odd, especially with reverb-enhancing mods: none of the replacers I've looked at included ANY of the reverb layers, defaulting to Bethesda's sound keywords on their weapons instead, which triggers the
Bethesda Bang.
Note to modders who may go and look: you may see a number of files named for the correct weapons, and think, whatchoo talkin' bout, they're all here!
Yes.
And all those differently-named files are playing the same sound. I thought I was losing my mind. Eventually checked 'em all. Tables were flipped.
~ spacefiddle
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