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Ear Damaging Loudness (Gun Sounds)
Assigned, NormalPublic

Description

After shooting the mosin today to kill a deer, I noticed that the gun shot was so loud that it actually hurt my 'real life' ears, I use headphones and after this happened, I needed to log out and take a break. Personally im very careful with my hearing as part of my job is being an audio engineer and recordists (I make videos, and record all my own sound effects). Currently there doesn't seem to be anyway to turn up the ambiance, while having the sound effects of guns and tools, that you are using turned down to a safe level; Even chopping down a tree is ridiculously loud.

I really love listening to the ambiance in Dayz, even though the crickets chirp in the morning when it should be the birds. The only solution for me that i can see is to manually turn down my volume before using tools or shooting, or to actually wear real life hearing protection, but as you can imagine this is not always practical. There should be a volume slider for ambiance and one for other sound effects. Even as im writing this post, my ears are ringing and sore (this was part of the reddit post I made yesterday).

If I turn down my volume then I literally can't hear anything, I can't hear zombies, I can't hear other players. If I wear ear plugs under my headphones, I can't hear these ether. Thing is, there is such a massive difference in the sound decibels db, we go from 'barely audible' to 'ear damaging' levels of loudness. If the volume is at a comfortable level for ambiance, then I have personally measured close gun shoots at 75db to 80db. I know you're going for realism with Dayz, however you can't damage peoples hearing for it.

Today, is the second day after this happened, and my right ear has a strange inner ear twitching going on, I know that with time this will go away, but this should highlight the reason for needing a separate volume slider for sound effects.

Details

Severity
Feature
Resolution
Open
Reproducibility
Always
Operating System
Windows 10 x64
Operating System Version
2004
Category
Fatigue
Steps To Reproduce

Get someone with 10/10 hearing ability, put decent headphones on them, turn up the volume to max, so you can actually hear the ambiance and other sounds required to play the game. Make them fire the Mosin or any number extremely loud guns outside, and ask them how are your ears?

Additional Information

I originally sent an email to bistudio support, and I was directed here, however I feel like this is just being brushed off. I will be doing some research into 'loudness standards and regulations', that were apparently setup prevent ear fatigue for gamers. But ill give your team sometime to take this seriously first.

Event Timeline

Sammyj created this task.Dec 13 2020, 11:44 PM
Geez changed the task status from New to Assigned.Dec 18 2020, 12:46 PM
jaredvar added a subscriber: jaredvar.EditedDec 30 2020, 10:12 PM

Just wanted to provide additional confirmation that this is an issue. Gunshots are so loud that I turn my sound effect settings down to 50%, and they are still loud on my headphones. Most other sound effects are fine, but I am not able to hear footsteps very easily by putting the sound effects so low. Please let me know if you want to hear about any of my hardware/software settings- this is a relatively fresh install of Windows 10 so not much should be outside the norm.