Some sounds do not play in Penumbra: Overture. Examples: A thrown object creates no impact sounds, walking creates no footstep sounds.

On certain sound cards there are some problems that will make the sound playback faulty. There are two solutions to this, one quick and simple and one more complicated.


Solution 1:
When running Penumbra: Overture, in the Main Menu, go to Options and select Sound. In the menu that appears, if Use Hardware is "on" set it to "off". This should make the sound play as it should, however this option does not support Surround Sound, if you have a Surround Sound setup use the next solution.


Solution 2:
There is a settings.cfg file for Penumbra: Overture located on your Windows harddrive: My Documents\Penumbra Overture\Episode1\
Open it with a text editor, such as WordPad found in the Start menu/Program Files/Accessories/, locate the entry <Sound and then the two settings MaxMonoChannelsHint="0" and MaxStereoChannelsHint="0". 0 means that the game auto configures this setting and it can cause problems, try setting it to a number like 12, 24 or more for MaxMono. For MaxStereo you should set it to 4 or more, but over 5-6 it's no point as the game should never have more than 5 stereo sounds playing at the same time.

An example: If you have MaxMono set to 8 and MaxStereo set to 4, that would result in a total of 16 audio channels as 1 stereo is 2 channels. To make the modifications properly, you should not have more channels than your audio card supports.

What settings you can have depends on how many audio channels your audio card supports. You can check this by opening another file created by Penumbra, the hpl.log file which is also located in the My Documents\Penumbra Overture\Episode1\ folder. You use a text editor for this file as well. At the almost beginning it has a section called Initializing Sound Module, below that you should find a Number of channels:

If you have quite few channels, for example it says Number of channels: 16. Then the problem might be caused by MaxStereoChannelsHint="x" being set to high, try setting it to 2 or even back to 0 to allow the game to auto configure the setting.

Most soundcards today have between 24 and 32 sound channels, more expensive and powerful cards have anything from 64 to 128 or even more.