GRiN_desmond22

We began working on GRAW in mid January 2005 - that's 14 months, in other words insane. Also, we started out with little more than 20 employees, and doubled that number during the development GRAW - and we're still just 1/5 the size of the 360 dev team. In other words, we're a hard workin' bunch of fanatics. Less is more - quality before quantity - all that thinking goes into not only our game design, but into the entire company soul and its employees as well. Some people seem to think that because it's been five years since the last Ghost Recon for PC, the next installment (GRAW, that is) has therefore been worked on for five years. That is of course not the case. Mad props goes out to the 360 team who did a hell of a job too, considering they were developing a game for a new platform. I wasn't complaining about people who tell us what they want in the game - that's what y'all should do. I was complaining about people who just tell us what we did is not what they want - people who seem to feel a very strong urge to remind us all the time that the game isn't perfect, and don't provide constructive feedback but only express their endless disappointment: "This is not a worthy successor", "this is not GR", etc. What is GR - what made the game so great - is everybody's individual opinion, and a thing that is very hard to put your finger on. Some people can't stand that we skipped the "sould switching" thing, others think the soul of GR was in the setting, or the equipment, and because we don't have the same scenery or weapons that were GR1, then this isn't a worthy successor. Anyway, we know you're a bunch that's hard to please. Thanks for the support, all you "fanbois". To those who say "this isn't what we waited for" - I can only say: Well continue waiting a little longer, we're still working on it. And we're a bunch of hard workin' fanatics, I tell ya.

There were several things we still wanted to put in the game when we released it - but there was simply no time at the time. We'd be living in a dreamworld if we though the game was perfect - but we're dead set on going in the direction in which we've started out. It would be nice if this thread didn't turn into one of those "Yeah, indeed you do have a lot to fix. Just remember that. Let's hope this game turns into what we've all been waiting for for five years. Let's hope" threads. People try to make that sound somehow hopeful, although they're obviously completely rid of trust and also really enjoy being the cloud on someone else's sky. Or point them out. Even when we were on vacation these comments were common. There was "yeah, don't get too comfortable over there, you gotta get home and get things on track ASAP" attitude all over the place. Enough of that. Look, we know there are things to fix, and we're working on it. As for the feedback itself, it's very very useful. Of course, some things you ask for is just outrageous, and sometimes it seems you're not looking for a patch - you're looking for an expansion pack or a completely new game here - but most of the feedback is very healthy info for us to hear. We're taking all realistic requests into consideration, and although it is - as you say - impossible to please everyone, we believe the game will be all we wanted it to be after the patching. Some, who have just chosen to... "be that way", will continue to whine even after that. ...but most will be pleased. That is my firm belief.

Just start a server with the maximum # of players set to 1.

Well if I didn't know stuff my guess wouldn't be very qualified, now would it?

You don't use the tac map though...

This bug has been reported to the guy responsible for the HUD. He's looking at it now.

My qualified guess is that the future of the GRAW PC community is one of sprouting and flourishing.

It's fixed now, and will be in the next patch.

I'm on it.

The ping was 125 if I remember correctly. We have T1 connection here. Some Swedes are tall and blonde. If the tall/blonde %age amongst the Swedish people is higher than that of other countries, I don't know - but that's the cliché.

I was out on my first match on a public server just now. That was cool.

Slight misunderstanding there, maybe?

Yeah. And in the future, when you want to mute a sound in a "nice" way, exchange the entire wave tag (within the sound tag that bears the "name" attribute) with <silent/> ...then the call for that sound won't even occupy a voice on the sound card.

By all means, feel free to use the in-game option to turn voice quotes on and off. Go into options (directly from the main menu before you start a game, or by pressing ESC while in-game) and uncheck "Voice Quotes". I admit it might be a bit hard to find since it's under the "Game" flap and not the "Audio" flap in the options menu.

Tom Salta composed the music for Graw - I think he did a splendid job. Not that it's very original in style (very much "The Rock" music, much like the main score of MGS) - but very effective. However, when I first got the files I was so confused because every "act" of music had three or four very long loops with different levels of intensity, but no transitions between them. I though to myself "how are we supposed to make dynamic music aout of this? The pieces are too long and they don't even blend together seamlessly!" - I assumed that the game should have dynamic music. After all it's 2006. I thought that kind of thing was what everyboby expects. I thought it was standard. So, in a kind of panic I chopped up the long loops, and started to use pieces of the existing loops and blend them with an occasional cymbal or timpani drum in order to conceal the "seams". The result is all the files you can extract from the music acts that contain the word "exit" - these are the transitions between the different intensity loops. It was a lot of work, and then our UBI producer told me the music was in fact not meant to be dymanic like that. Well you PC gamers got it anyway cause I had already done all the job. Ulf programmed the dynamic music handler and made sure the intensity of the music changed with the intensity of what's going on on screen. If you play the 360 version you'll hear a difference in how the music is used - it will go on and off more, whereas in the PC version the music can fluently go from one level of intensity to another. To me, that says something about the quality thinking here at Grin - everybody wants everything to be the best it can be. UBI wanted me to implement the Il Niño nu-metal tracks into the game but I did my best to keep it to a minimum - I, like you, don't like it and don't think it belongs in a Tom Clancy game. I reduced it from game soundtrack (which is how it is used in the 360 version) to an ambience effect - it is only audible from radios inside buildings here and there on the maps. The one rock track that I used in a few key sequences (in the Hercules before you do the parachute drop, as well as when you've completed the game) was a cover of Bob Dylan's "All along the watchtower" made by some temporary all-star group with musicians from many different bands. Whitey Ford (aka Everlast) sang the lyrics but I didn't like it at all so I edited out all the vocal parts. I think movie and game soundtracks should be instrumental because lyrics often infringe on the atmosphere.

I also meant some completely different map...

Yeah that's a bug we'll have to fix. @calius - Yeah the sound muffling when heard through walls and stuff is EAX. There might be a little reverb added as well, but not much. Most of the reverb heard when you fire is pre-mixed yours truly - with the help of EAX it changes character depending on how much walls and buildings surround you.

*whispers to the other grinners* "Shadapp! Now you guys are giving away what map we've been playing the most, meaning the gr.netters won't agree on playing that one in our gr.net vs grin match..."

Indeed, "Shanty Town". "Warehouses" is a good one too.

Yes, it is for example: "Hotel Zone has fallen under enemy command"...and other message the guy says. I do not know his name and who he is..but.... I will look into disabling the EAX for Multiplayer purposes only. Eh, ok. This message was very cryptic. I asked if anyone had sound problems that were only audible only in DOM mode, but not specific to the the sounds that are specific to the DOM mode. The "Hotel Zone..." radio announcements are very much specefic to the DOM mode. I know that if you play the game on a localized (French, German, Italian or Spanish) installation, the DOM radio announcements will only be clipping noise. This will be fixed in the next patch. Once again, is there anyone who has specific problems with any sounds in the DOM mode except for the sounds that are unique to the DOM mode?

First off, always make sure that your speaker/headphone output setting on your sound card matches the speaker/headphone setup you have connected to your computer. Creative has for some reason not defined an exact standard for EAX, meaning that all cards that have, say, EAX 3.0, don't necessarily have the 3.0 features implemented the same way. Then on cards with EAX 4.0, the differences in the EAX implementation is not always just the features added on top of the 3.0 features - the "old" 3.0 feautes may be calculated differently than they were on the 3.0 cards when they were new! Other card manufacturers can as you know have EAX supported on their cards (or the software can emulate it), but when Creative themselves cannot uphold their own standard, what would you expect from the copycats? In other words, the entire EAX deal is kind of a mess - and it is very hard for a sound designer such as myself to make the game sound the same everywhere if I was to lean on EAX extensively. Because of this, I decided to use EAX with great caution in GRAW, and not have the performance of the in-game sound lean on it at all. Initially, I had great hopes, and for example I made tests to see if we could maybe use EAX realtime distortion on the crosscom voices. This way, we could have had the distortion change dynamically so that your teammates' radio voices were more distorted the further away from you they were standing (would have been cool, huh?), but that didn't work to my satisfaction - we discovered a bug that Creative was aware of but didn't have a solution for. In the end, the game doesn't use any features from any version of EAX above 2.0 - so if someone told you that you need 3.0 to fully support the sound, that person is very much misinformed. If you're having problems with EAX on, you can turn it off without losing anything. Someone said here that he lost sound quality (or missed out on certain sounds) with EAX turned off - this I find very strange. If anything, it should be the other way around - you should have problems with EAX turned on. People might have such a firm belief in EAX and its supposed positive effect on game audio that they imagine GRAW sounds better with it turned on. However, as stated above, the truth is that EAX doesn't add much to GRAW. A 5.1 or 7.1 sound system does. I still nurture a hope, though, that EAX can become what it is supposed to be. I hope in the future, that sound hardware will be as important as GFX hardware - because sound is half the experience, and still it is so completely overlooked. By software developers, by hardware developers, by end users.

Ok, I thought this was an issue with the "Hotel Zone has fallen under enemy command" type of sounds - but when you mention SP and CO-OP too (which do not feature these quotes), I assume there are other sounds (than those unique to the gameplay mode) that are malfunctioning in DOM mode?

Are you playing a localized version of the game? French, German, Italian or Spanish?

Well, as I said, I have no idea what is the actual problem - but that's the only thing I can think of that might be the problem. The creator of the extract program you are using is the guy (or girl?) to go to.

So now i just want to learn how to repack the files ive edited.. Oh wait, I just tried to extract the 50cal sounds, but nothing extracts.. Ive tried voices and music, and that worked, but extracting these 50cal sounds didnt. First off - since I haven't programmed the extract program you're using, I am really not the guy to ask for support when it doesn't work as it should. Secondly - has anyone else successfully exctracted a weapon .bank file? If not, here are some thoughts on why it won't work: Voices are all in mono (and all voices in any given .bank file are all the same quality), and music is all in stereo (and here too, all files in any given .bank file are all in the same quality) - however, any weapon related .bank file (such as the 50cal_wave.bank file you're trying to extract) contains a mix of files with different quality (and some a mix of both quality and mono/stereo wavs) - so I guess that might have presented a problem to your extract program. That's the only thing I can come to think of that is different between the kind of .bank files you've already successfully extracted, and the 50cal which you failed to extract. That might help whoever created the extract program to do the necessary tweaks to it and get it to work on .bank files with all kinds of content (Firefly?).