61 replies to this topic

[Hyginos]

However, there's nothing physically preventing the software from showing noise direction accurately to the limits of the monitor.  Relying on Asus software being bad means it might only be sorta-kinda-fair till the next motherboard is released.  That's not a new meta I want to participate in.

 

The limit also exists in how the engine outputs sounds.

 

A while back I pulled a bunch of the audio assets into audacity to peek at their frequency domain. Most of the sounds have a really messy FFT, and many of them sat close enough together that I couldn't set a graph range that would allow me to distinguish them. If you were to layer all that crap together with the constant ambiance noise in hawken it would be rather difficult to identify.

 

The question becomes: is the software analyzing the sound output directly and extrapolating position from that or does it know where sounds are coming from already and then put it on a graph? The former would be no more effective than a decent pair of headphones IMO, the latter is getting into hax range. Both would require a precognition of the exact sound used for each footstep/servo whine and would still not be able to tell you if the mech was friendly or not.

Edited by Hyginos, 08 February 2016 - 09:27 AM.

[Epsilon_Knight]

The limit also exists in how the engine outputs sounds.

 

A while back I pulled a bunch of the audio assets into audacity to peek at their frequency domain. Most of the sounds have a really messy FFT, and many of them sat close enough together that I couldn't set a graph range that would allow me to distinguish them. If you were to layer all that crap together with the constant ambiance noise in hawken it would be rather difficult to identify.

 

The question becomes: is the software analyzing the sound output directly and extrapolating position from that or does it know where sounds are coming from already and then put it on a graph? The former would be no more effective than a decent pair of headphones IMO, the latter is getting into hax range. Both would require a precognition of the exact sound used for each footstep/servo whine and would still not be able to tell you if the mech was friendly or not.

 

Well, it's built out of the audio driver, so it has, at minimum, the same positional audio information as the player, and can represent it visually.  Consider when you encounter an enemy 1v1.  Friendlies are always on radar and HUD, anyway, so any noise that's not center (your own mechs footsteps, cockpit audio), and not one of the game's very few environmental sounds, and not immediately ruled out by cross-checking the radar is likely to be an enemy mech.  

 

1v1's, without a nearby firefight, while not extremely common, are definitely the occasion where anyone would be looking at the sonar.  Frequency isolation is only a problem if enemy mechs don't show up distinctly on the sonar, other noise is fine as long as an enemy mech can be identified correctly -- perhaps their relative position around the pillars in test arena.

 

Now, whether the engine processes the positional audio on the CPU and spits out the result to the sound driver or not, I'm not sure.  However, the DirectSound API would pass positional audio to any capable driver and hardware for audio acceleration.  If the driver is being given the raw positional data to "render" the sound with the proper volume and direction for its position, then it would be trivially easy to pinpoint anything emitting a sound with perfect accuracy.

[PoopSlinger]

XFXfuryx already has private profile on Shadeness's app meaning its MOST LIKELY just a new account of one of the hackers. 

[CraftyDus]

You're either an idiot or a god.

 

Eyes are accurate, easily down to ~0.015 degrees.  For audio localization, directly in front of you, accuracy is down to ~1.0 degrees, but 7-15 degrees for sounds located further to your sides.  That's without interfering, often louder sounds.  So having something you can watch at the bottom of your screen giving you better than 360 degrees worth of directional information IS better than human hearing.  Seeing a directional indicator for sounds that would be substantially or entirely camouflaged by your mech noise IS better than human hearing.

 

You could argue that Hawken's audio information is incorrect (which would throw your ears off, too), or that the ASUS driver/software is bad at translating the audio information to a lateral direction (doubt it), or that there's too much noise in the software (though XFXFuryX's personal experience would differ), maybe.

 

But hey, why bother with the details when you can always just call anyone who disagrees "kids", and assert that it's not an advantage at all?

 

-the speakers are on (or in my case bose truesound earbuds, in) your ears, not "7-15 degrees to your sides"

-the mech noise isn't camoflaging anything it is the thing you are listening for

-you would be much better served going negative in a raider without that opaque red bug stuck on your screen giving you 1. late 2. blurry 3. redundant information

-it's the difference between watching music on a winamp-type visualizer and hearing the music

[Epsilon_Knight]

-the speakers are on (or in my case bose truesound earbuds, in) your ears, not "7-15 degrees to your sides"

-the mech noise isn't camoflaging anything it is the thing you are listening for

-you would be much better served going negative in a raider without that opaque red bug stuck on your screen giving you 1. late 2. blurry 3. redundant information

-it's the difference between watching music on a winamp-type visualizer and hearing the music

 

- Basic bio 101, crafty.  All sound hitting your ears is vibrating the same tympanic membranes.  It's only how the sound is attenuated or the difference in timing between it reaching the ears that makes you sense directionality.  Video game audio is attempting to emulate how sounds would actually be distorted by angle and timing, so if you play the sounds from sufficient quality speakers, they would be indistinguishable.  See also: binaural recording.

 

- I was talking about the noise of your mech, which I thought would have been obvious.  Cockpit alarms, enemy sighted, footsteps, your EOC reloading, whatever.

 

- I don't use the sonar.  Raider was my first mech and used almost entirely prior to August 2014.  I had sub 1400 MMR back then.  I'll say again, attack the messenger when you're getting fuzzed up by the message.

 

- No, it really isn't.  Listening to music is an experience.  We're not talking about distinguishing between mech footsteps and boost, which might be hard to do on a visualizer.  We're talking about directionality.  Stay with me here.  Are you capable of recognizing a direction given inside a circle on your screen?  If so, like most humans, your eyes are probably more accurate than your ears.  This is the reason we have wallhacks and they're more popular than soundhacks.  Wall hacks are more useful than positional audio, but they're underhanded cheating.  

Edited by Epsilon_Knight, 08 February 2016 - 10:24 AM.

[XFXFuryX]

Well then.

 

After reading through all the wonderful community comments, ranging from "Hacker" to "Liar", oh and my personal favorite "Idiot" I have decided you all are absolutely right! This new technology is not beneficial in anyway WHAT SO EVER!

 

In fact since I am the only person in the entire thread that seems to own and use this new technology. I MUST INSIST.

 

What the fck was I thinking?

 

You all are absolutely right!!!

 

Please don't buy this new fangled hardware advancement. Surely a piece of technology designed and developed by the #1 Company in IT Hardware couldn't possibly know a single thing about developing a properly functioning piece of hardware.

 

PLEASE PLEASE EVERYONE, just erase this entire topic from your mind.

 

For crying out loud. Its like trying to convince a elderly person that a computer could be useful to their lives. No matter what angle you use, the old timers will never see a need for the new and improved.

[-Tj-]

Nothing concrete to go on until someone posts video of it in use in Hawken, properly configured, whatever that may mean.

 

I want to note that I'm specifically asking XFXFuryX to post videos of their gameplay. They can post all the ROG Sonic Radar videos of other players and technical specs and company information they want, but I won't believe anything they say about it being powerful in Hawken until they themselves prove it.

 

There is a very good reason I'm asking XFXFuryX specifically to do this, and I'm pretty sure we won't be seeing any videos surface from this player showing any kind of proficient use of the software (I'm sure some of you have already picked up on why). And no, "my hardware isn't capable of recording video" isn't an excuse I will accept, because if they care so much about computers and gaming as they put forward, then they more than likely have invested enough in their hardware to be able to record their gameplay.

[CraftyDus]

You can't tell if its above or below, if it's steps moving toward or away, if its a mech repairing or a pred cloaking, etc.

Its a super crappy visualizer, I urge you all to use it, it will not help you.

 

the person saying they are using this to any effect was saying it to cover for their cheats and is currently rage-hacking,

and actually accused me of aimbotting in a rev gl

 

so bad decisions, terrible judgement, and irrational reactions...and a thin implausible cover are all this amounts to.

 

Its gimmicky junk.

you cannot demonstrate an advantage of that silly nonsense over a decent set of ears

 

 

name this tune

[Kopra]

/r/theydidthemath

 

I think it was mostly tested, rather extensively, but it can be justified.

 

If you consider a sound source that rotates on the horizontal plane around the head at a distance, the distance from the source to each ear is dependent on the angle. Different distances mean different travel times, hence we can process that little difference in time and therefore determine the angle.

 

To simplify things a lot for this calculation, we can assume the head is completely transparent to sound waves and that the ears are just two points in the horizontal plane. Just to shoot some values, whether they are needed or not, I assumed that the head has a 10 cm radius, and the sound source rotates the head at a distance of 50 cm, clockwise. Zero angle is in front of the nose, 180 degrees or pi is around the back, 90 degrees or pi/2 is to the right.

 

The first square rooted term is the distance of the sound source to the left ear as a function of angle. The second square rooted term is the distance of the source to the right ear. The distances are subtracted and a derivative is taken.

 

https://www.wolframa...2+(50cos(x))^2]

 

So, what this shows is that the derivative, eg. the rate of change of the distance difference is at its highest when the source is in front of the nose, and the least when the source is to the side. What this means is that the distance, and hence the time difference can vary just a little bit while the difference in angle can be great. To add to this, at the side the shading effect of the ear and the skull is reduced, which further reduces the resolution.

 

The locating system of the ear is believed to combine many different ways to determine the sound source, but the difference of time is the most critical one as it is central to phase and transient differences. Attenuation caused by the ear and the skull further help determining the location.

 

When you see babies turning their heads upon hearing sounds, it may look cute but in secret it's hardcore configuration of their audio locational systems.

[Hyginos]

The locating system of the ear is believed to combine many different ways to determine the sound source, but the difference of time is the most critical one as it is central to phase and transient differences. Attenuation caused by the ear and the skull further help determining the location.

 

Attempting to locate a sound source using triangulation when you only have he difference between two distances is certainly a real thing, but I highly doubt it's actually relevant in this case. Dynamically shifting the sounds delivered to each ear by a tiny margin seems like it would be an unreliable solution compared to adjusting the volume in each channel and perhaps slightly dulling sounds that are through walls or behind the observer.

 

If, say, a mech is 20 meters away and forms a right triangle with your 0.1-meter-apart ears (for convenience) with the speed of sound at 340m/s the difference in delivery time is 7E-7 s, which I think is fast enough that you would need dedicated hardware to run it. That puts the minimum clock at some where in the 10Mhz range, which the cpu could surely deal with on its own in a vacuum but once it has to go through the operating system and the game engine I'm not so sure. As someone building an engine or a game, I'm not sure I would dedicate resources to something that required timing that tight but can really only be used to determine where the sound originates on a a surface that I'm to lazy to describe mathematically but I think looks like a sort of parabolic cone.

[Kopra]

Attempting to locate a sound source using triangulation when you only have he difference between two distances is certainly a real thing, but I highly doubt it's actually relevant in this case. Dynamically shifting the sounds delivered to each ear by a tiny margin seems like it would be an unreliable solution compared to adjusting the volume in each channel and perhaps slightly dulling sounds that are through walls or behind the observer.

 

If, say, a mech is 20 meters away and forms a right triangle with your 0.1-meter-apart ears (for convenience) with the speed of sound at 340m/s the difference in delivery time is 7E-7 s, which I think is fast enough that you would need dedicated hardware to run it. That puts the minimum clock at some where in the 10Mhz range, which the cpu could surely deal with on its own in a vacuum but once it has to go through the operating system and the game engine I'm not so sure. As someone building an engine or a game, I'm not sure I would dedicate resources to something that required timing that tight but can really only be used to determine where the sound originates on a a surface that I'm to lazy to describe mathematically but I think looks like a sort of parabolic cone.

 

If I understood you correctly, you're describing accuracy that goes as low as ~0.14 degrees (or ~0.28 degrees if you meant ears being 0.1 m distance from the center of the head). For a human being, 2 degrees is considered the minimum audible change of angle in the front.

 

If you consider the minimum angle to be 2 degrees, then you're looking at a time difference of 20 us. From an electronics standpoint, a phase shift that can manage this is possible, but I don't have experience or the expertise in audio drivers or cards that do this kind of thing. It's possible that for computational reasons, this is done at a worse accuracy that gets the job done.

 

edit: error in value

Edited by (KDR) Kopra, 09 February 2016 - 09:07 AM.

[Pelanthoris]

I'll just leave this here. You know, for fun times.

[Xacius]

- No, it really isn't.  Listening to music is an experience.  

lol

[Epsilon_Knight]

lol

 

Nominating this for shtpost of the year.

[CoshCaust]

<arguments>

I'm just here to point out a potential miscommunication i think i'm seeing.

 

It is fact that our eyes can determine things in greater resolution than our ears [apparently]. You seem to be arguing that this ROG "assist" is pointless because it doesn't add resolution, but i believe the argument is not that the assist visualizes exactly the detail you'd hear at, but that the visualization is directly connected to the sound source and in turn allows for a greater resolution than what our ears can detect.

It is in fact within the realm of possibility for a computer to visualize sound waves a la simulated reality; [even if an "assist" or cheat isn't doing exactly this, still] this means that a computer can provide 100% of relevant information to the user not just in the form of audio, but also in the form of visualization (hell, you could make reasonable arguments for visualization providing more information, not just information at a higher resolution)- in this example case, seeing the visualization would inarguably give the user a better perception of the source of the sound than simply using their ears (assuming our eyes are in fact 'better' than our ears).

Of course, none of this is relevant if Hawken isn't outputting accurate enough sound data which an "assist" or cheat could process (like Epsilon and others have recognized).

 

I'm not pointing fingers, saying anyone is right or wrong, or claiming any real conclusion can even be drawn without the fuzzing ROG devs dropping by to explain in detail how their audio hax are generated/visualized- i'm just making sure we're on the same page.

 

...That being said, i really doubt this is going anywhere when we lack so much information. ATX22 said it best:

... This is a crutch ... It may not have the same impact [as cheats], but it sounds like it's getting as close to crossing that line between cheating and not as you can get.

The conclusion is this: This ROG thing is a crutch at the very least.

Other conclusions we can probably agree on: People in question are probably not even using this "assist" and are just using cheats they downloaded from sleazy websites which by the way made their computers part of a fuzzy bunnyng botnet.

Seriously, open the wrong word document via email and you can donate your computer to Vladimir in Slovakia; do people really think nothing bad is happening when they use a random person's DOT fuzzy bunny E X E?? That's literally the only benefit a software engineer would get from writing you fuzzy bunny kids your stupid cheats that get outdated within months anyway. Your computer belongs to them.

Edited by CoshCaust, 10 February 2016 - 01:50 PM.

[CraftyDus]

It won't help you
The premise that it's the thing helping what's-her-name is a funny excuse.
The player trying to rely on it in any shooter will be just as lost and situationally unaware as any new player unaquainted with soundwhoring.
As lost and situationally unaware as the players in every rog sonic radar video available on YouTube.
It's a worthless gimmick. Theory crafting that something like it could work is what got ASUS to market it in the first place.
Seeing how bad it is in action is better than all the empty words here trying to paint it as even remotely effective in practice.

[Nept]

I watched some demo footage from 2015.  Unless you're deaf, it looks borderline useless.

[hestoned]

i might be wrong but i remember reading some where that your ears have a faster reaction time than your eyes? if thats the case then this software is useless. lol just look at me. hackusations just from listening to people walk around. you can hear people twist their torso in this game lol why the heck would you need this garbage haha.

 

you dont need surround sound headphones or audio software to pick up on peoples locations. if people want to hack in this game they should just use pred to hide it like that one idiot who i wont name.

[PoopSlinger]

Oh look, its the high tier cabal showing up to dissuade us from using the same hax they themselves employed to become the high tier cabal.

Don't trust the cabal, look what they did to SS.

[DallasCreeper]

The low tier cabal is where it's at. Join me, it's a bit lonely. 

[TheButtSatisfier]

I haven't looked at this carefully, but do you need a specific hardware setup to use this? If not then I'd be willing to give it a try and record my impressions.

 

My two cents having never used it: I feel like in a 1v1 situation the current radar would be more useful than this thing. When I'm 1v1'ing and there are corners involved, I tend to line up my cursor where I think the person will be, and then keep an eye on the radar with my peripheral vision while listening carefully. If I hear a jump boost I know I need to adjust my aim higher - and that would be confirmed by the ingame radar.  If I hear footsteps then I'll already be looking (and have my cursor placed) where needed. If I don't hear anything then I don't stay in the open to see what's going to happen.

 

Throw in a sonic display? Now I have another thing to pay attention to when time is critical. Even if I assume that this sonic display accurately identifies sources of sound, it's still going to tell me that someone is in the general vicinity where I already know they are. If I move my eyes to watch this display to try to discern exactly where my enemy is, then I've now introduced a delay for the moment when I have to snap my vision back to my cursor and begin tracking my enemy.

 

I feel like this thing would be a crutch that would prevent/delay a player from learning to rely on situational awareness, listening to in-game sounds, and general positioning. Once those skills become second nature I think they easily outshine whatever advantage this thing could grant.

Edited by TheButtSatisfier, 11 February 2016 - 07:44 AM.

[MechFighter5e3bf9]

I think it was mostly tested, rather extensively, but it can be justified.

 

If you consider a sound source that rotates on the horizontal plane around the head at a distance, the distance from the source to each ear is dependent on the angle. Different distances mean different travel times, hence we can process that little difference in time and therefore determine the angle.

 

To simplify things a lot for this calculation, we can assume the head is completely transparent to sound waves and that the ears are just two points in the horizontal plane. Just to shoot some values, whether they are needed or not, I assumed that the head has a 10 cm radius, and the sound source rotates the head at a distance of 50 cm, clockwise. Zero angle is in front of the nose, 180 degrees or pi is around the back, 90 degrees or pi/2 is to the right.

 

The first square rooted term is the distance of the sound source to the left ear as a function of angle. The second square rooted term is the distance of the source to the right ear. The distances are subtracted and a derivative is taken.

 

https://www.wolframa...2+(50cos(x))^2]

 

So, what this shows is that the derivative, eg. the rate of change of the distance difference is at its highest when the source is in front of the nose, and the least when the source is to the side. What this means is that the distance, and hence the time difference can vary just a little bit while the difference in angle can be great. To add to this, at the side the shading effect of the ear and the skull is reduced, which further reduces the resolution.

 

The locating system of the ear is believed to combine many different ways to determine the sound source, but the difference of time is the most critical one as it is central to phase and transient differences. Attenuation caused by the ear and the skull further help determining the location.

 

When you see babies turning their heads upon hearing sounds, it may look cute but in secret it's hardcore configuration of their audio locational systems.

when you see cats with their jaw wide open like they are brain damaged they are similarly using their tongues to smell in 3d