I AM THE TABLE

I recently made a "Milsim Sound Mod" for Half-Life 2 using the DayZ sound stored in the Dayz PBO files. A lot of these sound files sound quite good. How they sound in gameplay doesn't necessarily translate from the soundfiles themselves. Something that was mentioned by WOBO in this video is that several guns sound very similar at a distance. The reason why is the reverberation tail between several guns seems to be shared. Tails seem to fall generally into three categories: for pistols and submachine guns, medium rifles, and the tails for big rifles and shotguns are shared. There are some weapons with unique tails. The close, medium, and distant dry gunshots are highly individualized for the weapon. The problem seems to be that for distant gunshots, the tail is mixed too loudly. If you listen to combat footage, the gunshot itself is generally the loudest part compared to the tail even far away. In real life and in uncompressed audio recordings, the initial bang is magnitudes louder than the tail. However we want both to be loud in a video game setting where gamers aren't playing with speakers that can produce a .308 rifle at 160dB SPL. So my logic is that for distant gunshots (half a klick away.), simply bring down the rerverberation tail about -12dB and the balance between that and the initial bang should be louder. Since the initial bang for each weapon is more unique, it should be easier to tell the sounds for different rifles far away. This is especially true for big rifles vs shotguns. The dry gunshot between the big rifles and shotguns are all unique, it's just the tail that's shared. So by making the bang louder and the tail quieter, it should be much easier to tell if it's a semi geared player with a police shotgun vs a top geared player with a VSD sniper rifle. Another suggestion is to distinguish the KA family of rifles. All of them share not only the same tail, but the same dry gunshot initial bang. Mechanically these weapons should sound the same, but with different barrel lengths, muzzle devices, and calibers, the bang should have a different timbre from KA to KA. Something I experimented with was simply speeding up the bang for a distant gunshot 1.5x and comparing that to the original. I find by speeding it up, it's snappier and more abrupt with less boom. This could be used by one or more non 7.62x39 KA.