General sound fx has not been a huge deal in the past TES games, and I find it hard to come up with some games who use it well besides the horror game genre.
So I thought about this cool idea.

If the engine was capable of real time filters on the sound fx imagine what you could do!

For example, you are walking in a huge valley, pretty quiet but your footsteps in the snow echoes around in the valley, and then you hear a barbarian nord screaming on the hill and running towards you, and when your swords hit eachother the sound echoes in the valley

But there should only be echoes some places and in fog the sound would not travel far, so you could just make some conditions on weather types and you could apply settings in regions


This could also be used to improve the sneaking system

let me know what you think of this idea

Definitely would help with immersion and atmosphere !
But I don't think we will see this in... Who Knows ?

doesnt some of this happen in fallout?

Don't know haven't played Fall Out 3 a lot :confused:
So can't really comment on it, but if it were implemented in FO3 then its great!

That would be wonderful, but I think it is still impossible or very difficult to craft such effects in games. Having sound detail of that magnitude is not the priority anyway. I would be very pleased if I could hear the rain or noise outside everytime I entered a church or an inn.
Fallout New Vegas had distant gun sounds.The gunshots of enemy weapons sounded different at long range.

Being a "sound guy" myself, I find sounds and sound system extremely important. Although realtime filters like echoes, reverbiation, and EQ'ing does indeed have value, it wouldn't be the first thing I would fix or add. Echoes isn't something I've heard a lot of in games, except some wildly configured cheap springverb. Everywhere I encounter reverbiation in games, they go completely nuts about it rather than subtle.

Some ideas about a new updated sound system:
* Check walls and propagation magnitude, not (only) 3D distance. Extremely important for indoors, For outdoors, occlusion and obstruction should be sufficient.
* Stereo files for everything. As distance increases to sound source, stereo width decreases. Fully close, stereo width is full, but only about 25% amp on the "far ear".
* Weak doppler effect.
* Resurrect Acute Hearing Should decrease background noises (ambiance) so that chatting NPCs or approaching footsteps can be heard from farther away.
* Sound occlusion and obstruction.
* Sound maps or some kind of environmental sound type parameter depending on area. I.e. rain would sound different for: Meadows, rocks, houses, paveways/roads, lakes and sea, and maybe modulated (i.e. by EQ) by mud, ice and snow cover.
* Entering water slowly and sneaky shouldn't leave a big splash - few manages to get this correct.
* Fix the current sound problems/bugs, I'm experiencing a few...

New Vegas definitely has some atmospheric sounds effects (you can hear distant battles). I like it.

Obviously, instead of gunshots Skyrim would probably have clash of metal, or the twang of a bowstring.