Guild Wars 2

If you’ve played guild wars 2 for even more than an hour, you’re most likely familiar with the annoying sound bug where random lines of dialogue and sound effects from NPCs and minions are played 10x louder than max volume every now and then.

I’ve recently found what causes it and how to fix it. I wish I had a video to prove it better, but the group of NPCs that I was filming stopped talking before I could record all of it. Basically what was happening was I would walk far enough away for their models to clip (stop being rendered) due to line of sight. As soon as this happened, the GW2 engine didn’t know where to ‘place’ their next line of dialoge (or sound effect), and so it defaulted to 0 meters away, inside my head.

I then walked close enough to peer over the ledge they were behind, their models were rendered in the game world once again, and their sounds were properly placed in the 3D world space. This is 100% repeatable.

Another theory I have is that they were experimenting with a line of sight ‘sound dampening’ audio effect to make sounds that come from behind a wall sound duller or softer, and since the code is incomplete, whenever an NPC is behind a hill of terrain or a wall or something, the code doesn’t know what they wanted it to do and simply plays at range 0 meters, making it very loud.

You know how it’s caused, you know how to fix it, let’s see if we can’t vanquish this annoying as hell bug once and for all.

Not sure on the policy of linking to reddit forums, but I posted this on reddit also.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/znctm/anet_i_found_the_cause_for_that_randomly_loud_npc/

TL;DR: the bug occurs when NPCs that hadn’t loaded their model (behind a wall etc) were in audible range of the player. The engine needs to play their sound file because you’re in audible range, but doesn’t know where to place the sound as there is no model to attach it to, so it defaults to inside your face. (very loud)