The mix the owner's ears overruled
A captured clip with no audible music started a measured sound pass. Guns were the loudest thing in the game, takes of the same sound differed by 11 dB, and the target in the spec turned out to be wrong. A week later the explosions went silent by being too clever.
Written up later from the repo's history and dated to the days it describes.
On October 14 the owner watched a clip captured from Earfh and said there was no music in it. That sentence became a sound pass, and the first thing the pass did was measure.
What the numbers said
The guns were the loudest sounds in the game, and they repeat. Measured by the loudest 400 milliseconds of each take, the pistol, rifle and shotgun sat at around -13 to -15 LUFS. Takes of one sound disagreed with each other by up to 11 dB, because the owner's second batch of mouth recordings was 8 to 11 dB quieter than the first four. The music was fine. The 14 tracks measured between -13.9 and -16.9 LUFS, with true peaks well under the ceiling.
The pass measured 206 takes and gave each a trim, sorted into 12 tiers. It added a light duck of music under big hits, at 3 dB, with a 0.02 second attack, a 0.12 second hold and a 0.45 second release. Only the biggest impact sound triggers it. A master limiter sits at -1.0 dBTP, and a volume slider at zero now truly mutes. The pistol, shotgun and rifle came down by 6.0, 5.3 and 3.8 dB.
The target was wrong
The spec asked for gunfire to sit 2 to 6 LU above the music. Before the pass it was 2.6 LU above, and after it was 1.1. That missed the target on the low side, and the owner played the two against each other and preferred the quieter one. The spec was rewritten to match. A measured number had lost an argument to an ear, and the ear was right. Raising the weapon tier by 2 dB moved the fire segment only from -16.4 to -16.2 LUFS.
Silent explosions
A few days later, the owner reported that explosive weapons and barrels were inaudible. The cause was a pitch setting. Explosions had been played at 0.6 of their recorded pitch, which pushed a mouth-recorded boom toward sub-bass and stretched a 2.8 second take to 4.7 seconds. A barrel chain also ran out of voices, because three were allowed and the rest were dropped.
The fix plays them at recorded pitch, allows five voices and spaces them 0.05 seconds apart.
New guns, new sound
On October 19 the guns, mobs, power-ups and the elevator got sounds from sound libraries, and the owner's mouth recordings for four of the guns were replaced. The reaction was "what an upgrade." The mouth recordings remain in the repo history.