I think there should be some kind of sound effect when your weapon hits a shield. From what I can tell, only missiles make a sound (explosion), and other weapons like plasma make none. I’ve watched many scifi series during my life, and one of the shows with the nicest shield hit sound would be Stargate Atlantis. If any of you have watched it, you should remember the thumping sound they make when hit. It would sound pretty rad in GSB aswell.
GSB already suffers from sound overload issues though - or at least my sound tends to get kinda clipped when too much is happening at once. Adding even more to the mix would only worsen it, though if that could be fixed in some way then shield impacts would indeed be cool.
I think it is just your sound card which has too limited amount of simultaneously playable channels. I haven’t heard any kind of clipping on my matches yet. (But I could be wrong too. :P)
That happens quite rarely for me, and I doubt that one extra sound could put much stress on it. I’d just like to know if Cliffski is planning to add this any time in the future. Could you, gratuitous commander?
Huh, interesting to know the sound thing isn’t universal. No objection then, I guess.
I turned off “hardware sounds” and the constant sound clipping stopped. Now the game just takes more of my CPU, but I wasn’t doing anything else with my computer anyway. 
Interesting, so the sound clipping must have something to do with hardware afterall.
Very likely. I seem to recall sound cards generally used to only have a certain number of channels for different sound… threads… for want of a better word (well, the better word is channels 
I believe that is still the case (just a much higher number of channels than back when it was REALLY noticable, and having even 16 channels was awesome.) I guess that problem is dodged when doing it in software.
I noticed in GSB’s prefs.ini file, it sets a value for the number of sound channels.
sound_channels = 512
At a wild guess… I’d say that means it’s using 512 channels. So, in software mode, if it needs to play up to 512 sounds at once, great. If it needs to play more, you’ll get some chopping. When using hardware sound, the limit might bit lower because of your hardware, making it more noticable.
Hmm. Would it work better with less chopping if one increased the channel amount in the prefs.ini?
I’m still hoping for shield hit sounds to be added in 1.18 or 1.19 by the way. Waiting for Cliffski’s comment 