Are Sound Effects going to getting any love?

[Sounds]

I posted somewhere else, but seeing as there's a devoted group for this sort of thing, I'd thought I'd ask here.

Whilst the original sound effects are passable, they could do with some TLC. As I looked through the KS Mk II, I could see no mention of anything related to Sound Design or revisions to the actual effects. It there anything going to happen on this front?

[Cyborg]

I think this came up sometime before. Yes, the sound effects will need a once over. A gigantic battle should sound like the Fourth of July.

[x4000]

Oops, just to chime in here: yeah, we're on a whole other level in terms of sound design now.  The original effects aren't even something I'm looking at.  We're using different mixing techniques, different mastering on the original effects themselves, positional audio and distance attenuation, an vastly MORE and higher-quality sfx.

So they won't sound so repetitive with just a few effects per type of shot or explosion, for instance.

Back when I was doing the sounds for the original AI War, we had to mostly work off of free sources, etc.  At this point we've built up a library of 80,000+ sound effects, not plus 6 variants in many cases for those, and our general pipeline for creation and playback and so forth is completely different now.  I'm not even going to open up the sound effects from the original game for any purposes.  Just starting completely from scratch.

I haven't gotten around to that yet, but it's on my list for soon.

[WeaponMaster]

Thought I might bump this to give a bit of input based on criticism I saw on the Steam forums a while back (the thread appears to be deleted now). The summary of that user's opinions was something like "the sound effects feel very weak", not in those specific words though.

It took a bit of time to understand, but I think I've come to realize what the big difference in sound effects between the first and second game are: there's very little low frequencies present in the AI War 2 sound effects. Even if the sounds from AI War 1 were stock effects, they had a great range of very high frequency effects like the missile frigate and laser gatling sounds, and then very low frequency effects like the fighter and bomber sounds.

When a sound effect pass is done, it would be great if the sound effects could be diversified like this again. I think it would make a huge difference; I can remember quite a few sound effects pretty clearly from AI War 1, but if you had to ask me what an autocannon minipod or sabot guard post in AI War 2 sounded like, I wouldn't be able to describe it.

[RocketAssistedPuffin]

Long time after the last thing here, but I think I've found something.

It seems like laser pulse weapons, like those used by Raptors, as well as Pike shots are a lot...louder than most effects. I only just found that Spider weapons like what Ark One uses has a much deeper sound to it, because it's so quiet I had to have the volume up and maximum zoom in to pick it up.

The Artillery Golem also has a nice deep, fire-like sound to it, but while I can hear Concussion Corvettes firing just fine, it's completely silent. So it seems that the game does have some low frequency sounds, but for whatever reason they're much quieter.