waxdart, what you're talking about has nothing to do with headphones and everything to do with game development. No wonder we're not communicating properly. While I absolutely agree with you that sound in videogames, that triumphant on only the rarest of occasions and even then is still not great, ambient noise is perhaps the hardest thing to do in a virtual world. Having spoken with developers about this in the past, I can safely say that many don't want to touch the subject because of how complex it becomes.
I remember a few years back a discussion on water effects. Water, seemingly easy to program, is nearly impossible to do realistically. And the more realistic it becomes, the more stress it puts on the machine, not by multiples, but by magnitudes. Sound poses not only a similar problem in processing power, but of physical sound. Having thousands of sounds for one specific scene when there are hundreds of scenes, even if some are used several times over, is realistically impossible. No development studio would have the time, resources or budget to do it in the standard development cycle.
My personal opinion on how to make the best sound is to literally recreate real-world physics and give all objects in the world their true properties: a tree in-game will have the actual proportions to a real tree. Same density, same weight, same thickness...etc. Then, when an object (which has similarly true proportions) touches or hits it, the physics will calculate the actual sound, thereby reproducing it and not requiring any recording.
As for holographic effects and other 3D sound technologies, some work and some don't. The point of surround is to better spatially orient gamers in the game. It's not so much about immersion as you seem to be pointing out, but about making sure players can perform actions more accurately, be it listen for gunfire, aim at enemies or just turning the camera wildly while someone talks to you to hear the sound come from all directions.
And yes, for gamers even with nearly unlimited budgets, sound systems go up to millions of dollars. Thousands will get you, if you're lucky, a semi-professional set of 2.1 speakers, nothing more.
I remember a few years back a discussion on water effects. Water, seemingly easy to program, is nearly impossible to do realistically. And the more realistic it becomes, the more stress it puts on the machine, not by multiples, but by magnitudes. Sound poses not only a similar problem in processing power, but of physical sound. Having thousands of sounds for one specific scene when there are hundreds of scenes, even if some are used several times over, is realistically impossible. No development studio would have the time, resources or budget to do it in the standard development cycle.
My personal opinion on how to make the best sound is to literally recreate real-world physics and give all objects in the world their true properties: a tree in-game will have the actual proportions to a real tree. Same density, same weight, same thickness...etc. Then, when an object (which has similarly true proportions) touches or hits it, the physics will calculate the actual sound, thereby reproducing it and not requiring any recording.
As for holographic effects and other 3D sound technologies, some work and some don't. The point of surround is to better spatially orient gamers in the game. It's not so much about immersion as you seem to be pointing out, but about making sure players can perform actions more accurately, be it listen for gunfire, aim at enemies or just turning the camera wildly while someone talks to you to hear the sound come from all directions.
And yes, for gamers even with nearly unlimited budgets, sound systems go up to millions of dollars. Thousands will get you, if you're lucky, a semi-professional set of 2.1 speakers, nothing more.
/www.roccat.org/Products/Gaming-Sound/ROCCAT-Kave/
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