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Better Sound Levels Mod v7.3

Do you like the battle sounds but hate all the yelling and screaming that drowns out all other details, such as melee sounds? Or do you think that the guns and cannons and magic blasts sound weak? Do you think the campaign map and battlefield is so full of noise that you can hardly make out the details? If so, then this mod is for you!

This mod aggressively adjusts the original battle sound levels (attenuation) so that you get a better mix of audio effects, rather than hearing nothing but mass yelling and screaming of constant ear-plundering vocals, especially when the camera is down at the ground level. Additionally, battle audio is re-mixed so that guns, cannons, and magic are louder, voices are bit less invasive (voice volume should "fall off" (diminish) better over distance from the POV), and melee sounds, Foley effects, projectile flight and impacts are more easily heard (and "fall off" less quickly over distance). Sound effects are brought more to the front of the audio scene, and vocals pushed to the back, so the speak. The most important part of sound design is getting the sound levels of each sound right, otherwise details are lost, or there is no impression of power.


Essentially this mod is a tedious 500+ hour revision (including testing - aka "playing") of the WH3's battle audio by a game developer/sound designer. Think of it as a re-mix, or a remaster of the battle and campaign audio, to fix the hot mess audio mixing in the standard game. This mod only adjusts audio table data -- essentially the data "under the hood" (and all of this is accomplished with numbers - in some cases extreme settings given the limited tools to work with - without adjusting anything in Wwise), so it should work with every other mod available. Additionally, no other sound mods were used nor evaluated in the creation of this mod (truth be told, I didn't even check if there were sound mods out there before I started working on this, and it is probably better that I didn't, allowing me to blunder down my own path here, but also allowing it to develop in its own direction. So, everything here is specific to this mod).

Edited: This mod originally focused on battle sounds only, but has now been expanded and also adjusts the sound levels of various campaign map sounds too, so that subtle details on the campaign map can be more clearly heard, rather than hundreds of map sound effects competing with each other in a constant drone of identical volume noise.

This mod...
✅Is save game compatible
✅Is compatible with all DLC
✅Works in multiplayer campaigns (as long as your friends also have it activated)
✅Should work with every other mod in existence (unless they also adjust sound data)
✅Can be turned off and on whenever you want


Suggested volume level settings (in options menu)...
🔊Speech: 60%
🔊Effects: 100%
🔊Interface: 90%
🔊Music: 65%

🖥️Make certain you choose the correct speaker configuration or it will not sound good, no matter what you do!

NOTE: After each CA patch, it is best to re-check your volume slider levels because they may get reset (at least it has happen once before).

IMPORTANT:

It is normal for sounds to drop out during battle. Why this normally happens is complicated, but it is primarily due to two main reasons (in most games): culling and size.
___a) Culling is generally where only so many sounds can be buffered (played) at once due to hardware limitations that exist in all games, and what usually happens is sounds are culled (dropped) from the buffer of ~500 sounds (AFAICT) based on the quietest, oldest (those that have been alive the longest), or furthest distance away.
___b) Size deals with the priority of the sound being played (which I think internally CA refers to as intensity, difficult to determine). So, if you are close to an entity playing a louder (larger) sound, then the other sounds 'in the scene' will be reduced in volume or (usually) muted, likely depending on the size comparison. It is important that it works this way because otherwise you would have a drone of overloaded noise and you wouldn't be able to distinguish one sound from another. This would be the audio equivalent of mixing all the paint colors together on the palette and trying to paint a "picture" from the mixed singular brown mud color). This is also a trick/technique in audio design in movies and games where you make the loudest sounds actually sound like they are louder, by reducing the quieter sounds (fade off all sounds right before a huge explosion, for example).
With all that in mind, there is only so much that can be done about sound drop outs. The long term plan is to try to minimize this as much as possible, but otherwise this is an issue with the sound engine.

NOTES:

I stress that this mod does NOT add new sound effects, nor does it change any sound effects. It changes the VOLUME (attenuation, culling, and distance parameters) of the sounds, altering the distances in which they can be heard, among other fine adjustments. It also creates a lot of new profiles for sounds, to affect the properties of them based on the type of sound, and the distance that they should carry. Think of it as a remix of the audio. It is possible that the average user might not notice the obvious improvements, but even without trained ears you should notice details and sounds that you didn't hear before.

You will still hear yelling and screaming in battle from when units charge, or if a unit screams all the time in combat (like the "Sisters of the Screaming Doom" Dark Elves unit), but you won't hear the constant excessive yelling/screaming during melees, and especially won't hear all the random soldier vocals unless you are down near the action (the distance that these were heard were too far away). Then where voices are heard, they fall off rapidly over distance.

All future patches and DLC are compatible with this mod, regardless of if it says the mod is out of date or not in the future. By its nature, it is designed to always work, although totally new DLC added projectile types might need their audio properties tweaked to match but this is a minor issue.

KNOWN SOUND ENGINE ISSUES NOT CAUSED BY THIS MOD:

The more I analyze the sound engine, the more I believe it has some serious flaws, and the more I think that the loud vocals are probably intended to conceal them. When I make adjustments, I always compare the sound with the mod ON and OFF. There are times where, no matter what, some sounds will drop out for no apparent reason, and I have checked and confirmed that this happens also with the mod OFF. If you want to see an example, turn the mod OFF, and run a skirmish battle as Khorne, and get a single Skull Cannon. In the pre-battle deployment, fly the POV around and look at the Skull Cannon. When you look at it from the south, sometimes (not always) you will notice that you cannot hear the engine idle sound, nor the occasional flame discharge from its mouth, when you are looking directly at it (it becomes silent). This happens with other units too, even while in battle. For whatever reason, you could be up close and looking at a unit from a certain direction and it may go completely silent. I am trying to see if I can figure out what the cause of this is, but it might just be something broken in the sound engine itself. That said, it is certainly something that can be lived with, but some might want to attribute this behavior to this mod and that is incorrect.