Version 0.18.3

[valneq]

Random question

But is the Factorio team open to suggestions regarding the sound? Like can I create some stuff and send it through instead of just saying "I don't like this/that"?

I imagine they would be, since they always finish each FFF with "as always, let us know what you think on our forum".
So yea, this is the time, and the place, to have this sort of discussions, so I say go for it - post sounds here.
At least it helps everyone understand what "sort of sound" you mean.
Often that works better than a description. Writing about sound effects is like dancing about architecture. :>

… or how about as a separate thread in the "Ideas and Suggestions" subforum?

[BattleFluffy]

… or how about as a separate thread in the "Ideas and Suggestions" subforum?

Normally I'd agree with you there, but since this is what is actually being discussed in this release thread, I think posting it here is entirely appropriate. :> However I will of course defer to mod/dev preference. I just wanted to make sure everyone felt included in the conversation.

[Sander_Bouwhuis]

I disagree with relegating this to a mod. Most people will just play Factorio vanilla and not know/bother with mods when 1.0 hits (and 'normal' people get onboard).

This should really be good in the vanilla version. They hired a new sound guy, so allow him to do his job.

[netmand]

I agree the game sounds still need tweaking.

My experience to date has been relegated to one of oppressed acceptance. I don't know where to begin. I just have this feeling of, close but no cigar yet when it comes to the sounds of factorio. I have almost all sliders turned down. I only value the walking sounds at the moment.

But hey, a factory is supposed to be chock full of sounds that aren't pleasant, right?

[peternlewis]

But hey, a factory is supposed to be chock full of sounds that aren't pleasant, right?

A factory is, but a game isn't, and a Factory Game needs to be a lot more game than factory…

Sounds that are continuous and ubiquitous (belts, bots, inserters, assemblers) should be relatively muted. And nothing should have high pitch elements.

Other elements (say accumulators) can be louder, because if they are annoying, you can move away, or build them further away. But that is not an option for ubiquitous elements like belts or bots.

[planetmaker]

The new colours on the minimap are totally awesome and a big improvement on the usability of the map. It makes distinction of different things much easier, aids in finding stuf and some omissions or mistakes without reducing clarity from the overview picture. Kudos!

[HammerPiano]

The new sounds are amazing, shotgun is an interesting one

[Filter62]

Train sounds now kinda meh (Not good, not bad), but at least it's not electric train anymore) Belts is better, I can tolerate them now. Belt sounds wasn't pleasant to begin with, I mean pre 0.18 version, so I guess there's some work about it that has to be done.

[netmand]

Currently for me the two oddest sounds experiences are:
- The rubber squeaky sounds, from the inserters I guess?
- The angry alien sounds... the groan loop is way too short and unnatural

[mrvn]

I think it would be cool if one could click at an entity with an annoying sound and get a volume control pop-up. There should be sliders for the various sound effects an entity has (e.g. a chest would have a slider for opening and one for closing) and a mute button below the slider. A master slider could also be useful to control all sounds equally.

I do realize that most of the game you don't want to change the sounds. So maybe this would have to be activated by going to the sound settings and clicking an "Edit entities" button. This would then minimize the sound settings and allow clicking at entities to change their individual volumes. For the annoying belts sound the procedure would then be: open sound settings -> edit entities -> click at a belt -> turn down volume / mute.

[Impatient]

I think it would be cool if one could click at an entity with an annoying sound and get a volume control pop-up. There should be sliders for the various sound effects an entity has (e.g. a chest would have a slider for opening and one for closing) and a mute button below the slider. A master slider could also be useful to control all sounds equally.

...

omg, that is a good idea. please make a feature request and post a link here. I personally would be happy with a volume control for each entity type and an option to select custom sounds for that entity type.

[kbk]

...
I do realize that most of the game you don't want to change the sounds. So maybe this would have to be activated by going to the sound settings and clicking an "Edit entities" button. This would then minimize the sound settings and allow clicking at entities to change their individual volumes. For the annoying belts sound the procedure would then be: open sound settings -> edit entities -> click at a belt -> turn down volume / mute.

I'd like to disagree with this approach. Granular sound control is not supposed to become that popular, I guess, so if implemented it is more easily achievable via some wiki-documented console command or config file edit rather than through a dedicated GUI section. To an average user navigating deeper within menus is costlier with each manipulation, be it click or scroll or whatever else, so most people would resort to adjusting their master volume slider because they are annoyed enough yet too lazy to deliver an avalanche of clicks. A dedicated slider for all the repeatable humming sounds at once might also do the trick.

[Impatient]

... so if implemented it is more easily achievable via some wiki-documented console command or config file edit rather than through a dedicated GUI section. To an average user navigating deeper within menus is costlier with each manipulation, be it click or scroll or whatever else, so most people would resort to adjusting their master volume slider because they are annoyed enough yet too lazy to deliver an avalanche of clicks. A dedicated slider for all the repeatable humming sounds at once might also do the trick.

I don't see how the need of typing and pasteing console commands would make a lazy player happier, if one wants to change the volume on certain entity sounds.

[kbk]

I don't see how the need of typing and pasteing console commands would make a lazy player happier, if one wants to change the volume on certain entity sounds.

A lazy player in the wild surely doesn't have a longplay set of those, because if he does he should use the master volume knob. Otherwise even pasting a couple of commands on per game basis is considerably less annoying than dosens of hours of whatever drives him nuts.

[mrvn]

...
I do realize that most of the game you don't want to change the sounds. So maybe this would have to be activated by going to the sound settings and clicking an "Edit entities" button. This would then minimize the sound settings and allow clicking at entities to change their individual volumes. For the annoying belts sound the procedure would then be: open sound settings -> edit entities -> click at a belt -> turn down volume / mute.

I'd like to disagree with this approach. Granular sound control is not supposed to become that popular, I guess, so if implemented it is more easily achievable via some wiki-documented console command or config file edit rather than through a dedicated GUI section. To an average user navigating deeper within menus is costlier with each manipulation, be it click or scroll or whatever else, so most people would resort to adjusting their master volume slider because they are annoyed enough yet too lazy to deliver an avalanche of clicks. A dedicated slider for all the repeatable humming sounds at once might also do the trick.

Why should it not be popular?

Also you imply navigating through the menus would be too costly. Since it's not that popular hardly anyone would be inconvenienced. So what do you care? This is not something every user would do once a minute. It's something you do very rarely and probably just once per game. So who cares how many clicks it takes?

[Impatient]

A lazy player in the wild surely doesn't have a longplay set of those
....

What does that actually mean, what you are writing?

... because if he does he should use the master volume knob.

Shouldies never work as argument.

Otherwise even pasting a couple of commands on per game basis is considerably less annoying than dosens of hours of whatever drives him nuts.

And having a volume slider on some entity sound menu is even less annoying than pasteing commands.

Your riddle-lingo really does not help your point, if there is any point at all, I start to suspect.

[kbk]

Why should it not be popular?

From my POV I could expect a lot of things that could factor in for every individual player:
- general interaction cost problem, as I've mentioned a lot already
- accessibility of physical volume controls. Most laptops and home sound systems usually have them and so they are generally even more favorable (moreso for lazier ppl of course) than just navigating to sound settings, especially in dire situations that, thank gods, do not occur in Factorio
- industry-standard accessibility and variety of existing in-game sound controls and player expectations upon those. In most games audio controls are roughly the same and at the same place navigation-wise from game to game, I reckon if noticing a per-entity control tab there for the first time will be met with due warmth
- a general interface design problem of the overchoice
- lifetime usability. Based on my and some of my friends' personal experience and UX behaviour of some twitchers I've used to watch some years ago, most players go to sounds menu tab once or twice in the entire career in the game: usually it happens in the first minutes to kill off the most creeping sounds (and music) or after the first playtest to address annoyances of lesser margins, then maybe somewhere midgame to adjust a slider or two
- finally, from how I perceive the latest forum activity, most people are just tolerant with the game sounds

Since it's not that popular hardly anyone would be inconvenienced. So what do you care?

I care about good, consistent design, implementation costs and the fact that your initial idea does not address the root of the problem – the design of some few of ingame sounds.

Your riddle-lingo really does not help your point, if there is any point at all, I start to suspect.

Having a submenu with volume sliders for the whole variety of ingame sounds is not ok because:
- it really benefits a small group of players (based on my subjective perception on how people have responded here and in previous FFF topic)
- it is already achievable in some indirect ways as of now — that is, at least via the existing sliders in the sound tab (and I also suppose one can resort to use any audio editing soft on the market to make this semi-permanent for them)
- every player that is supposed to benefit from this feature probably has his own set of slider-worthy sounds
- in one perspective on the last point, it just can't really be done partially (for example, on entity basis: if you have an option to dim belts sounds, someone else will then demand a similar functionality for machine sounds – and I fear this won't stop until all the sounds are represented)
- in other perspective, I can not expect any such set to be longer then 2-4 entries, which means that other controls have a possibility to never be used at all
- it takes some time to refactor the existing code and even more time to develop an interface, which can be spent otherwise
- that interface is going to grow huge (and then have a vertical slider) due to the abovementioned fact that there will be some minor demand for the sliders for most sounds
- that interface is going be disused by the majority of players due to the nature of features is contains and the fact that navigating too much and having a lot of choice is a strain in general
Having all these summed up I've come to thinking that mrvn's proposal you agreed with is probably not worth it, which is why I'm disagreeing with it. I admit I might have gotten wrong on some parts but to me this doesn't change the whole picture.

Let me then also recap my counterproposals. I've came up with:
- a single slider for all the naturally looping sounds in the sound tab of game settings. It is better because it doesn't take much time to develop and already has an options tab it will fit in, which is nice. At least you don't have to click a button and slide down through the another pop-up menu. On the downs side, this does not allow for granular control and the list of sounds affected by this slider should be carefully picked or someone will get disappointed.
- a parameterized console command for sound volumes. We all can imagine that it's considerably harder to type something in then to do a couple of clicks so it is not that good. On the good hand it should still allow for granular control for some and does not require any additional work on the settings menu.
mrvn had also proposed for a sound slider within each entity's UI which overall was more interesting. Alas it concludes naturally to having a handy place to control all the sounds at once, and that is just back where I had started. In fact all 4 of these proposals ain't really needed because they fix the fix and do not fix the problem. IMO the problem is, again, minor issues with design of certain sounds. The fix that is really required is a slightly better sound design, which I hope is on its way to delivery, not granular sound control. And that's what I was about.

The reason for "lingo" is that I'm usually too lazy to deliver a UN general assembly speech on every occasion and thus tend to presuppose there is some common sense and I'm going to say less and still be well read and well understood. I pretty much hope I've cleared the things up for now, sorry for any unintended toxicity from me any of you might've perceived.

[Impatient]

Today I discovered, that there was a mod made already before the discussion started to address exactly this problem.

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/VolumeControl

[mrvn]

You are contradicting yourself and making my point. But lets pick out some relevant points:

Why should it not be popular?

From my POV I could expect a lot of things that could factor in for every individual player:
- general interaction cost problem, as I've mentioned a lot already
- lifetime usability. Based on my and some of my friends' personal experience and UX behaviour of some twitchers I've used to watch some years ago, most players go to sounds menu tab once or twice in the entire career in the game: usually it happens in the first minutes to kill off the most creeping sounds (and music) or after the first playtest to address annoyances of lesser margins, then maybe somewhere midgame to adjust a slider or two

You are saying changing sounds will have too many interaction costs but players will ever do this once. What you have to optimize for is the product of the two. Things you do a million times have to be easy. Things you do just once can be hard. So the point you are actually making here is that fine tuning individual entity sounds can be complex, not that my rather simple way is bad.

Since it's not that popular hardly anyone would be inconvenienced. So what do you care?

I care about good, consistent design, implementation costs and the fact that your initial idea does not address the root of the problem – the design of some few of ingame sounds.

My design was aimed at minimal implementation costs and consistency. What it needs is one button in the settings to activate the fine tune mode. Then it's one dialog with a simple array of sliders that is build algorithmically from the prototype data for the entity you select. And then every sound object of the entity gets a volume variable that the sound driver uses to scale the volume before mixing them.

Yes, this will add thousands of volume controls to a modded game but at a fixed implementation cost. And each user will only ever look at a handful of them. Which ones will depend on each user and mods in use so there really is no way to simplify this down to a handful of sliders.

Your riddle-lingo really does not help your point, if there is any point at all, I start to suspect.

Having a submenu with volume sliders for the whole variety of ingame sounds is not ok because:
- it really benefits a small group of players (based on my subjective perception on how people have responded here and in previous FFF topic)
- it is already achievable in some indirect ways as of now — that is, at least via the existing sliders in the sound tab (and I also suppose one can resort to use any audio editing soft on the market to make this semi-permanent for them)
- every player that is supposed to benefit from this feature probably has his own set of slider-worthy sounds
- in one perspective on the last point, it just can't really be done partially (for example, on entity basis: if you have an option to dim belts sounds, someone else will then demand a similar functionality for machine sounds – and I fear this won't stop until all the sounds are represented)
- in other perspective, I can not expect any such set to be longer then 2-4 entries, which means that other controls have a possibility to never be used at all

Looks like you didn't understand the proposal at all.

There is not to be any submenu with any list of entities. The selection of which entity to control the sound of would be made in-game by selecting the entity. So when you are standing next to a centrifuge and the sound drives you insane you switch one sound fine tuning and then click at the centrifuge. That gives you sliders for every single sound the prototype for centrifuges has.

You are right, this would never stop until all sounds are represented. That's why the whole idea was to just have every single sound there right from the start. Total control for all the control freaks out there. Any attempt to pick and choose or limit what sounds can be controlled is just more work and doomed to fail. Also by not choosing what to control but simply presenting it all this can be done trivially in code simply by iterating over the prototype and implemented in the base class for sounds. It's something done easily and only once and every entity in the game, modded or not, will have it.

And no, existing sliders can in no way at all reduce the noise from belts without muting everything else too.

- it takes some time to refactor the existing code and even more time to develop an interface, which can be spent otherwise
- that interface is going to grow huge (and then have a vertical slider) due to the abovementioned fact that there will be some minor demand for the sliders for most sounds
- that interface is going be disused by the majority of players due to the nature of features is contains and the fact that navigating too much and having a lot of choice is a strain in general
Having all these summed up I've come to thinking that mrvn's proposal you agreed with is probably not worth it, which is why I'm disagreeing with it. I admit I might have gotten wrong on some parts but to me this doesn't change the whole picture.

And again a total misunderstanding of the proposal.

Any extra sound control will need refactoring. My proposal only needs refactoring of the base class in a trivial way. No choices are to be made what sounds to control and no code is needed to have both controlled and not controlled sounds. All sound is refactored in a simple way.

And the interface is going to only as big as the number of sounds each entity has. Which is in the range of 5, not 5000. Most displays won't need any sliders to show that many sound controls.

Let me then also recap my counterproposals. I've came up with:
- a single slider for all the naturally looping sounds in the sound tab of game settings. It is better because it doesn't take much time to develop and already has an options tab it will fit in, which is nice. At least you don't have to click a button and slide down through the another pop-up menu. On the downs side, this does not allow for granular control and the list of sounds affected by this slider should be carefully picked or someone will get disappointed.

Which will mute every sound so the annoying belt sound will be just as loud relative to everything else. If you turn everything down your ears will just adjust and the belts will still be too damn annoying.

- a parameterized console command for sound volumes. We all can imagine that it's considerably harder to type something in then to do a couple of clicks so it is not that good. On the good hand it should still allow for granular control for some and does not require any additional work on the settings menu.

Console commands are very hard to use. You have to know the internal names of entities and the sounds they can have. The code has to parse this and check the entities even has that sound. Correct error messages have to be made, values have to be checked for validity and so on. For the user to type in the correct console command would be harder than finding the file on disk and editing that in a sound program directly.

I also imagine that console commands would be the same amount of work as algorithmically building a GUI for the sounds an entity has but much much easier for any user to use. And after the interface part the actual computing of the sound is the same. So nothing changes there.

[Optera]

I think it would be cool if one could click at an entity with an annoying sound and get a volume control pop-up. There should be sliders for the various sound effects an entity has (e.g. a chest would have a slider for opening and one for closing) and a mute button below the slider. A master slider could also be useful to control all sounds equally.

I do realize that most of the game you don't want to change the sounds. So maybe this would have to be activated by going to the sound settings and clicking an "Edit entities" button. This would then minimize the sound settings and allow clicking at entities to change their individual volumes. For the annoying belts sound the procedure would then be: open sound settings -> edit entities -> click at a belt -> turn down volume / mute.

I like that idea, but it will require a fundamental change in how entity sounds are handled. Currently Factorio only supports setting volumes in data stage.
The next best idea of automatically generating settings for every sound file also won't work as setting stage finishes before data stage.
This leaves us with manually generating each setting, constantly update default settings to match changes in base and just live with users having to reset to defaults whenever the values change.