I’m writing today to talk about a cool little feature my friend Ajinkya Waghulde and I have wanted to put into Consortya for over a year. What we envisioned was a muffled audio effect when you’re outside of the club to really capture that feeling where the audio is passing through the walls.
He said he wanted it to be like this scene from Tomb Raider. Start watching around minute 1.
I found this great post on Stack Exchange explaining that get a muffled effect like that, you need to use a Low Pass Filter. I implemented a Low Pass Filter through the BASS audio engine by un4seen that we use in our concert sim Consortya.
I followed their advice and started the filter at 300 HZ, so it slowly rounds off all the frequencies above that. I thought it sounded pretty good, but it wasn’t quite right. Then I realized what was missing. I added in a volume cutoff as well. So when you step outside, the volume drops down to about %30 and has the low pass filter applied.
In the future I’d like the volume and filter change to happen at the exact same time, and for now, you can hear the volume change at a different time than the filter. It’s still pretty fun, and I’m glad you let me share it with you. Here’s a quick clip, and you can experience it yourself sometime soon when we’re having a concert.
MuffledLPF1 from Andy Martin on Vimeo.
