Re:Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only again...
by Hemospectrum on Wednesday June 13, 2012 @04:00PM
(#4108096)
Sound sources can be anonymized, though. If the source of a given sound is on the other side of a wall, the player can't see who it is, and the client doesn't need to know.
I'd go so far as to not even notify the client about sounds that are too quiet and far away for the player to be able to hear in the first place. Calculating echoes on the server and having the client treat them as separate "original" sound sources should also help somewhat.
Re:Rockstar condemns Max Payne 3 cheaters to play only again...
by jiggy2011 on Wednesday June 13, 2012 @07:10PM
(#4108964)
Even if you don't know who it is, knowing that someone is around the other side of the wall is a huge advantage in an FPS game. Also players tend to have their teammates displayed on a map, so the cheat program could take this into account and mark as friend or foe.
Pushing this info to the client early also allows the program to make sure all the required assets are loaded into memory before it has to be rendered.
You could stream sound from the server, but latency might be an issue.
You can hear somebody moving on the other side of the wall to you and for the sound to be realistic it needs to be played at the correct volume level determined by distance etc.
This isn't a big issue in some games , because you can just make peoples movements silent (of course there is still weapon sounds). However other games (like CS) have a stealth element where you need to make a tradeoff between moving quickly and noisily or slowly and silently so the sound is a big part of that.