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invictius

Why did doom 2 do away with pitched monster sounds?

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I've never been able to figure it out. Obviously the different pitches are done in the game engine, so at the time, it gave a lot of variety without having to double/triple the space that recorded pitched sounds would have taken up.

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I'm glad they were removed. Maybe I'm spoiled by Youtube Poop but these pitch-shifted screams just make me smile.

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Pft I like having pitch shifting on- the same sample over and over at the same pitch gets a little repetitive for me~

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It's strange they were removed, when they are fully implemented in the linuxdoom sound mixer -which I also used in Mocha Doom, duly ported-. It was interesting that the pitch-shifting sound code used the same fixed point arithmetic as the rest of the game to play back "fractional samples.

If I remember correctly however, the pitch-shifting code doesn't support 22 kHz samples out-of-the-box, it needs some hacking. Probably they just swapped it for something else entirely in v1.666 and above.

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After playing the iOS version, I've always wanted a way to remove the sound pitching from said version since it really didn't sound good. In other games it works just fine, just not Doom.

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High pitch hell knight deaths sound kinda funny. I think it's a good feature.

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This is probably solely because of nostalgia n' whatnot, but I've always found pitch shifting strange in Doom but perfectly fitting for Heretic. Pitch-shifty Dragon claw == yay :D

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Marnetmar said:

^I think it was actually removed after Doom 1.6 or something.


Changes 1.2 -> 1.4 beta bootleg 8-apr-94 (apparently also known as 1.3.
But reads 1.4 during start up.)
New:
- 8 channel sound mixing
- pitch variation is more intensive

Changes 1.4 beta bootleg-> 1.4 beta released 28-jun-94 (the official 1.4)
New:
- No more variable pitch sound effect

Source: http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?file=docs/faqs/changes.zip

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hex11 said:

Changes 1.2 -> 1.4 beta bootleg 8-apr-94 (apparently also known as 1.3.
But reads 1.4 during start up.)
New:
- 8 channel sound mixing
- pitch variation is more intensive

Changes 1.4 beta bootleg-> 1.4 beta released 28-jun-94 (the official 1.4)
New:
- No more variable pitch sound effect

Source: http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?file=docs/faqs/changes.zip


Lol, that bootleg was most likely the result of long troll campaign aimed at Romero by two college kids in Canada, who spent their time griefing the first years of the Doom competitive scene. I really wonder if it ...*was* Romero that "leaked" it...

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My main gripe with the shifting is when they pitch upward and sound like squeakey little smurfs. A smaller pitch variation, and only being able to go down say, a semitone at most would have sounded much better but still offered the variety that pitch shifting introduces.

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Pitch shifting is a lazy feature, more variety in monster sounds would've been better.

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Nothing more satisfying that killing an imp or baron with a lower-pitched sound. Makes you feel more accomplished for having killed a slightly tougher/manlier specimen, or something. Those with high pitches sound like little girls, though.

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Csonicgo said:

Lol, that bootleg was most likely the result of long troll campaign aimed at Romero by two college kids in Canada, who spent their time griefing the first years of the Doom competitive scene. I really wonder if it ...*was* Romero that "leaked" it...

I never heard of that. What's the story of the hacked startup message then? I just found it that way on some shovelware CD back then. I don't remember which one, though. It is not on any WAD CD I still have. If you change the string back to print variables, like in all other versions, it reads 1.3 at startup.

I actually liked the pitched sounds of 1.1 and 1.2. Also stairs and moving floors only made noise and no "clunk", probably because there was only a 4 channel mixer. I would miss the big powerup sound, though, which wasn't there back then.

I also liked the darker shade of blue they used in the setup program. I wonder why they ditched it in later versions.

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The Xbox version of doom has the pitch bended sounds, and if you think the chaingun or plasma gun sounds are grating now...

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