SSG B748-i v1.6 engine volume nightmare

[slgoldberg]

Hi, @Ricardo Bolognini and anyone else who might have ideas.

I recently got back to using the payware SSG Boeing 747-800 (which I'll abbreviate SSG B748 herein) and upgraded to 1.5.2 and then to 1.6 using the updater, etc. since it now seems to better work with XP11.  Let me start by saying, I absolutely LOVE the SSG products and especially this version of the 747 (both -i and -f)! I love the fact that you include the full FMC (thanks, Javier? :-) ), .. so many good things here.

However, I am really flustered by and frustrated with the engine volume / "DreamEngine" (more like "NightmareEngine" :-) ) situation.

In XP11, for better or worse, there are simple global sound knobs in the Settings > Sound screen, though they are not honored by a lot of third-party planes and plugins.  That's fine, I can live with that, because I don't really seem to get what I need from those controls anyway.

In SSG B748 (both versions), I know there are two separate sound controls: one in the setup screen on the side of the pilots' chairs, and the other in the DreamEngine pop-up that you get if you select it from the Plugins pull-down.

In both cases, they give me *exactly the opposite* of what I want/need!

Here's my problem:

I *want* to hear the engines in the cockpit, and when I switch to the external view, I want to hear the engines at a lower volume (or at least the same volume) but -- more importantly -- I want to be able to *hear* other things I can normally hear but are drowned out by the engine sounds (such as my copilot when using MCE, or an alert, etc.).

However, it's exactly backwards: what I *do* hear is extremely loud engine noise when I'm viewing externally; overwhelmingly so that it's shocking when I switch from interior to exterior views.  Additionally, I can barely hear anything else while I'm in an exterior view -- especially in flight. But when I switch to the cockpit view, I can hear everything well *except* the engines. If I put the Engine sound at maximum, in *either* or *both* controls (DreamEngine plugin and/or side panel) I get the same result: the volume affects *both* the internal and external sound. So, I can't turn up the volume of the engines inside the cockpit without also turning up the volume of the engines outside. That seems like the absolute wrong result. Backwards, entirely. Because now, if I want to hear the engines in the cockpit at a normal volume, I have to set the engine sound high (or even medium) and it sounds good in the cockpit. However, the instant I go outside (e.g. "Circle" view) I get the loudest cacophony of noise I ever heard. It shocks me every time. I have to dial the PC volume down really far to be able to tolerate it. But if I then go back inside the cockpit, I can't hear a damned thing of course, so I ratchet the volume back up, and .. the nightmare repeats.

I can't find anyone else who posted about this but it's been hard to search for this particular thing so I admit I may have missed it somewhere. So am I really the only one with this problem?? Perhaps everyone but me has some other sound plugin that makes X-Plane 11 sound work better?) -- All this stuff about 3D sound and I just get LOUD NOISE when outside and ALMOST NOTHING when inside. Ugh.

Sorry to rant, but I'm at my wit's end. I spent so much time just trying to figure this out, and I am at a loss so I'm finally posting here. If you can help, that would be awesome. I read the FCOM, I scoured the internet, I looked int he config files, I even removed my third-party plugins to see if that could be it .. and nothing has solved this. It really feels as if everyone thinks this is the right way for it to be. But I don't see how. Really, does nobody else but me switch views from internal to external all the time and have this volume nightmare to deal with?

Sound as everyone knows is super important. Not just because it's an awesome part of the simulated world, but it's something that people really need to get right (for example, when someone has a hearing disability, etc.).  So, I just really can't understand this. I know I should rant on the X-Plane 11 forum as well since it's probably at its heart an XP11 problem (all the claims by Laminar Research of XP11's improved sound synthesis, yet in the end there's no way to separately control interior and exterior volume?!) -- but you seem to use your own system anyway, so .. I think it's not going to help in this particular case.

Finally, I recognize that many third-party planes use the audio panel inside the cockpit to put things like radio volume and sources to listen to (such as JAR's awesome 330, among many others), but you don't seem to support that in your 747 audio panel. You seem to have just the VHF buttons "hot"; the rest are stubbed out... so unless I just missed it, I don't see how that panel would help me in this case).

Thanks so much for your help.

   Steve

 

[slgoldberg]

Perhaps more succinctly:

External volume and internal volume are not the same scale, whether I set up XP11's sliders or not (I do, but they're ignored right now by SSG B748-i/f v1.6).

So for example, let's say sound volume is a simple scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being silent/muted, and 10 being maximum.  Well, here's the crux of my problem:

In XP11, external sounds are played at a volume level of somewhere around 3-5x that of internal sounds. So, what would be level 1 inside the cockpit, turns into level 5 outside. That is, a soft sound inside the cockpit turns into a loud sound outside.  (This makes sense, since presumably both the plane and the simulator are trying to correctly model how sound really would be, i.e. to attenuate the sound when there are objects in the way, and especially where in a 3-D world the source of the sound is farther away and is directional, and the cockpit being in front of the engines and the bulk of the sound going out the back of the engines, it makes sense it is lower in the cockpit.)

However, the whole concept of volume controls -- and the reason people (humans) ask for volume controls -- is to modify the real-world parameters to accommodate something external to the simulator (or at least, something that only a human cares about). In this case, I want to be able to hear the copilot when I'm looking from outside the plane but also hear the engines at all when I'm inside. When I'm narrating a screencast, too, I want my voice to be heard even though I may have shifted the camera to be outside the plane.

I just want to hear the engines, and I want to specify that the level of the engines *in* the cockpit needs to be X, and the level of the engines outside should be Y. But the plane in this case, and XP11 though it's ignored by this plane, are both trying to force me to have them both be "X". Which means, if I specify X=5 in the cockpit, that means X=15 (!!) outside!  It's so frickin' loud out there, guys, it's ruining the experience. Not only that, but as XP11 tries to change the sound level based on your camera position, if you move the camera toward or away from the plane while it's flying, in exterior view, you get this horrible motion parallax which of course is correct, but still very annoying when the source sounds akin to a chainsaw to begin with. Commensurately, when you set the volume level so it is a reasonable level outside (i.e., X = 2) then it's far too soft to hear inside (really that means X = 0.05 or something).

This idea of camera placement and volume control is entirely for the purpose of humans, not the accuracy of the simulation.

So, I'm just basically asking for you to make the sound level not be a simple "amplifier" (that also attenuates if the volume is lower etc.) -- because if I say I want level 5 and change sources on my amp between a loud source (outside) and a quiet source (inside), an amp will happily just amplify both the same amount which of course is what is happening here.

I want, instead, to express volume in this context as an override, or a maximum, or whatever you want to think of it as. I want to have it be lower level than what you've modeled it here. I.e., "level 5" means, "5/10 after all other amplifications have happened". I.e., as a function of the current model, not just a simple filter.

Though it doesn't need to be that complicated; I'm speaking abstractly. In reality since everything in this realm degenerates nicely to "inside" and "outside" the plane, then for all that is right in the universe, please just give me two volume sliders again! (You used to have these, i.e. internal and external. X-Plane has them but they aren't just for engine noise, but everything.)

So I guess my request is really simple: please get rid of this "DreamEngine" plugin that does really nothing at all of any value (what does it do? I can't tell anything good about it, sorry), and replace it with the X-Plane built-in volume sliders, at a minimum.

In summary, here are my three proposals, unless someone can tell me this is already solved somehow and I just don't understand it yet. :-) :

  Option 1: Correctly honor the X-Plane internal/external volume settings for the engine sounds.

  Option 2: (Re-) separate the volume controls for Engine Sound level to be "for inside" and "for outside".

  Option 3: [preferred, simplest] Automatically scale the engine sound level based on whether the view is inside or outside. So if the user says "level 5", make that really level 5 in both interior and exterior views. That probably means having a simple mapping function, i.e. mapSoundLevel(viewType) where viewType is "internal" or "external", and have the actual volume sent to DreamEngine be the result of that mapping function.  I.e., something like (where say userRequestedVolume = 5):  actualVolume = mapSoundLevel(userRequestedVolume, viewType) or whatever..

--

OK sorry, I just really needed to get that off my chest. :-) Hope it's useful to get user input here and/or if I'm confused, if you can clear it up, I'm hoping others can benefit from this as well.

Thanks.

  Steve

Edited April 21, 2017 by slgoldberg
Removed the quote of the previous message.

[donoscar]

option 0: request this in the correct forum  SSG's support is at the org

12 hours ago, slgoldberg said:

 

  Option 1:...

[slgoldberg]

On 4/21/2017 at 8:59 AM, donoscar said:

option 0: request this in the correct forum  SSG's support is at the org

It's not a request for SSG. It's a request for Ricardo to explain to the good people at Laminar since they obviously do not understand this concept, that the current sound configuration options are useless and that plane designers are ignoring them altogether and that the combination of them ignoring them and poorly implemented third-party sound plugins not working correctly at all is extremely frustrating for those of us who pay for this crap.

Thanks anyway.

  Steve

 

[Ben Russell]

39 minutes ago, slgoldberg said:

It's not a request for SSG. It's a request for Ricardo to explain to the good people at Laminar since they obviously do not understand this concept, that the current sound configuration options are useless and that plane designers are ignoring them altogether and that the combination of them ignoring them and poorly implemented third-party sound plugins not working correctly at all is extremely frustrating for those of us who pay for this crap.

Thanks anyway.

  Steve

 

X-Plane 11 features an all new sound engine which will very likely address all your concerns and then some.

The problem is that it's all new.

It's also only just been documented;

http://developer.x-plane.com/2017/05/we-have-fmod-documentation/

 

[Airsmith]

@slgoldberg Ok late but may be there is still a need for it? Today i find out, that and may be it is only working after i did make the update to version 10r3 and not many people are happy with this update, so be careful doing it. But after one user did tell the people to make new the preferences the update of XP11 10r3 works fine for me. So now to your problem with the SSG 747 sound, i have the same trouble like you and don't like it. So today while im flying i just did open in the plugin menu the plugin disable/enable function and after i did press many times the next button i did find the entry for the Dreamengine and did disable it. After this step i can change the sound inside the normal XP11 menu with the default sliders. So i did push down the external sound nearly to nothing and after this i did turn my sound on my Receiver more loud so i can hear the engines inside the cockpit. But now not like before when i did switch to outside my sound was on the same level like i have it inside my cockpit. No screaming engine sound anymore. So may be give it a try. I hope it will help you like me.