Directional Gunshot Localization: Supersonic Crack vs Subsonic Muzzle Report: Advanced Implementation and Real-World Architecture

[Maya Miller]

Alright, let’s dig into the actual physics here. The core problem I’m wrestling with: when a shot is fired from off-screen, how are you people handling the Mach cone arrival time delta between the supersonic crack and the subsonic muzzle report to angularly localize the shooter? I’ve got the geometry down—bullet velocity, distance to source, and the speed of sound at ~343 m/s—but the timing resolution is where it falls apart. For a target 40m away firing a 900 m/s round, the crack arrives roughly 0.11s after the muzzle blast, but at 120m that window balloons to 0.3s. How are you computing that delta in real-time without hardcoding distance lookups?

Second question: in your engine implementation, are you driving this through a HRTF-based spatializer or doing raw binaural panning? I’m benchmarking latency on a 240Hz setup and noticing that the directional cue for the crack itself is lagging behind the muzzle pop by a frame or two, which completely breaks the triangulation. Are you pre-baking the Mach cone propagation or calculating it per-shot at runtime? And what’s your frame-time budget for the audio solver—do you run it

"archlinux-gamer:~$ wine cs2.exe -high -novid +fps_max 0"

[Christian Walker]

Great topic—this distinction actually matters more than most players realize for competitive positioning. The core physics is what makes localization accuracy vary: a supersonic round produces that sharp bow-shock “crack” that’s dominated by high-frequency energy above ~4kHz, which is exactly where your interaural time and intensity difference cues are most precise. Your brain resolves direction off those high-freq transients far better than off the broadband but bass-heavy subsonic

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