Immersive Sounds - Footsteps

UoExOsdfKFM

This is one of the most dramatic and instantly noticeable changes. Skyrim's vanilla footstep playback suffers severely from relying on a pre-loaded, generic dirt sound no matter what type of terrain you're moving on, or what type of armor you're moving in. This is taken care of so that you will always hear the correct terrain and armor type. In addition the amount of terrain types covered has been expanded to include metal and sand surfaces should you ever come across them.

In addition to player footsteps, NPC footsteps have also been overhauled. NPCs use their own unique set of footstep sounds, since both types are always heard from the perspective of the player the NPC ones should sound different with much less of a proximity effect (and it was also important to make them not so distracting). I think situations where you're running around with follower NPCs and hearing the exact same footsteps behind you is just too jarring and confusing so that's why I consider this extra important. Just like the player ones, the NPC footstep playback system has been expanded so that NPCs wearing heavy or light armor will always have the appropriate armor sounds when moving around, and cover more terrain types instead of just pulling from a shared generic pool of sounds.

It's not just the player and humanoid NPC races that have recieved attention. Many animal and creature footsteps have also been reworked. I did not plan to touch this originally since we already have Better Animal Footsteps for that, but upon further inspection I unfortunately noticed that those sound files are extremly unoptimized and are much larger than they need to be. Several of them are as large as almost 1mb each, when in reality they could be as low as 20-30kb (sometimes even less) without losing quality. Added together these files take up a lot of unnecessary memory while playing. Since it's an old mod with no activity for years, at this point it seems unlikely that the mod author will return and adress this problem, so I took it upon myself to create new sounds with the same goals in mind that are much more memory-efficient.

And finally, skeleton footsteps recieved a bit of special treatment compared to other creatures. They now have unique footsteps for dirt, stone, wood and snow instead of just 1 universal set. I thought this would be worth it for necromancer type characters having a skeleton follower running around, so they don't have