Missing infantry sounds in all Theatre of War games

[Hellmann]

Hi guys hope you're doing well. Well I took the plunge and bought ToW3 and so far it looks like a nice game, well done 1C/Battlefont! Although, I was quite disappointed to find the same bug re-occurring since ToW1; missing sounds of boots on the ground in large/normal battles! I don't know about you but for me it's a real immersion-killer to hear all the other sounds like vehicles, explosions, soldiers humming tunes to themselves and coughing, shouting, calling out, dogs barking, sparrows chirping and ambient sounds... but no footsteps!

Well as I say I've been frustrated by this since I bought ToW1 years ago so it isn't specific to ToW3 Korea in any way. In Tow2 Africa I decided to look into making my own fix; I extracted sounds.SFS with Dr Jones' SFS Extractor and examined the *.wav files. I noticed that the infantry sounds (i.e. steps_dirt_run_fast_01.wav, steps_water_run_01.wav, steps_sand_walk_fast_03.wav etc. are all recorded in 352kbps 22KHz, while the vast majority of the other samples are all in 705kbps 44KHz. So it's interesting to note the missing sounds are different in that respect, don't you think? Well, I up-sampled the offending *.wav files to match the other 705kbps 44KHz ones to see if that would work, but aside from sounding a little crisper (hardly noticeable) it made no difference to them cutting-out in larger battles, same as before. (Yes, I know that up-sampling doesn't improve audio quality I just thought there might be a conflict stopping them from playing properly in the game).

Then I thought perhaps it might be related to EAX's incompatibility with Windows 7 x64, so I installed Creative ALchemy and added an entry for ToW; no difference. I then re-installed the games in WinXP 32-bit (I use a dual boot for older games and applications that don't work in Win7 64-bit). Same thing. I then switched from my old 5.1 Creative soundcard to my newer Razer Megalodon 7.1 headset to see if that made a difference. No!! (I'm using the latest drivers/firmware.)

What's really frustrating for me is the footstep sounds ARE present and correct in small missions, where I'm controlling say a single squad, like the Russian elite guys in the Behind Enemy Lines mission in ToW1, my own user-created missions, or the tutorial. Same in ToW2 Kursk, the tutorial has the footstep sounds working smoothly. As for a major tank battle on the Kursk salient... forget it. Same in ToW3 Korea, the footstep samples "cut out" in big battles. I'm guessing this is a known bug where the tank/vehicle sounds have an overriding priority to footsteps? I thought maybe the tank sounds were "drowning out" the infantry sounds, but no! If I send a small squad miles away from the main force to encircle the enemy, the footstep samples still don't play. That's the most frustrating time for me, really odd to have no sound of boots on sandy paths when we should be clearly hearing them.

By the way, I noticed there is a Battlefront patch we can download for CMSF that states "fix for missing infantry sounds" in the release notes, but as I don't own CMSF I don't know anything about that. Maybe we might finally get a similar sound fix for Theatre of War if it's a similar bug in the audio engine?

Or... is it just me and everyone else has no missing infantry sounds in large battles? Or you have a fix for it? I used Google search but couldn't find any results!

Specs: i7 920 EX58-UD5 @ 4GHz, 6GB DDR3, Nvidia GTX 285, Creative Audigy 2 (EAX) / Razer Megalodon, Corsair HX 1000W PSU, Win7x64 / WinXP32 dual boot.