Update 0.9.9 - You Can Hear the Kills

Warpack Demo · published

A crowded fight was mud. You could not hear a kill happen in one.

I went and counted. A full board was firing around 25 sounds a second, and up to eight identical sword swings landed in the same frame. Everything that actually tells you something, deaths, spells, revives, was buried under that by about ten to one.

[ THE MIX ]

  • Sounds now cap per type. Two swings at a time instead of eight. Your ear only resolves two or three of them anyway, the rest was mush that ate all the headroom.
  • Swings count as background noise. Deaths, casts and revives count as information, and information never gets pushed out by background.
  • For a beat after something important happens, the swings thin out around it. That is the part that makes a kill actually land.

Nothing was added. It is the same audio, just not all of it at once. Measured after the change: swing noise roughly halved, and none of the sounds that matter got dropped.

[ ALSO, FROM LAST PATCH ]
These shipped in 0.9.8 and I never wrote them down.

  • Raised skeletons were fighting for the wrong side of the board on screen, and turning up as bright green squares.
  • Barricades were being counted as survivors, then quietly killed at the end so the numbers added up.
  • With a full skill list the army screen drew every skill name on top of the others.
  • The PLAY button played its click twice, which is why it was so loud.

Wishlist Warpack if you want to know when the full version lands.