CtrlFlick Recon

Left and right are measured directly, so an arrow only ever points into the half in front of you. Behind is a separate and much weaker question, worked out from how bright a sound is: when a contact really reads as behind you, the dot at the bottom of the face lights and fades. When the radar cannot tell, the dot simply stays dark rather than guessing — and it needs a few footsteps after you start before it will commit to anything.

While this window is open the radar is live and can be picked up — grab it and put it down wherever you want. Click into a game and the face stays on screen, and stays movable — put it where it belongs against the thing you will actually be looking at.

No. Left/right stays just as sharp either way — the bearing is always read from the low end of whatever arrives, however wide the range is opened.

Click the frame once and the arrow keys nudge it a pixel at a time, Shift+arrow ten at a time. Hold Ctrl and the arrows resize it instead of moving it, from the bottom-right corner — so a minimap can be framed flush to its own border without touching the mouse.

Because a gunshot and a footstep are not in completely different places. About a fifth of a gunshot's energy sits in the same band the footsteps live in, so past roughly 7 dB the only way left to make the gun quieter is to lean on that band — which is the same act as making footsteps quieter. Measured, on real gameplay, and it is not a setting anybody has failed to find: it is where the two sounds overlap.

So the three above are the choice, not a quality ladder. Protect is the quietest gun and it costs you the footsteps. Clarity keeps almost every footstep and protects you least. Balanced gets nearly all of Protect's quiet for a fraction of the cost, which is why it is the one to try first.

The four settings on this page decide how much of the footsteps you give up to make the gun quieter. That is a different question from how loud the footsteps arrive in the first place, and this is the second one. It is worth having because there is nowhere else left to find it — Windows' own volume is close to its top already.

It works with all four, not just one, and Protect is the setting it helps most: on its own, Protect leaves footsteps quieter than switching the effect off altogether.

It does this by bringing the quiet part of that range up towards the loud part, rather than simply turning the whole thing up — turning it all up would make the gunfire louder too and reveal nothing new. A side effect worth knowing: because of how it works, High leaves less gunfire in with the footsteps than Medium does, not more.

The catch is that the room comes up with them — background noise and voices in that same range — and that near and far footsteps sound a little more alike, so loudness tells you less about distance. Direction is unaffected. The effect will not let any of it get loud enough to distort.

Max is a different bargain from the other three and worth knowing before you pick it: it is much louder, which is what you want while you are hunting a quiet map, but it is the only step that makes footsteps harder to hear while the shooting is actually happening. If you spend more time in firefights than stalking, High is the better setting.

The cap turns everything down at once, because volume is the only control it has. This changes the sound by frequency, so it can hold the gun down and let the footsteps through. On the same recording, both take about 8 dB off the gunfire — the cap takes 8 dB off the footsteps with it, and Balanced takes 3.

They are not exclusive. The cap needs nothing installed and catches anything loud, whatever it is; this needs the effect installed and is tuned for gunfire.

Yes — this travels in a profile, so a game that loads its own settings brings its own mode with it. An ear-splitting shooter and a quiet extraction game do not want the same answer.

Because it is reading the sound Windows has already sent to your headset, so it hears a bang a hundredth of a second after you do. Nothing it does can catch the leading edge — what it catches is the part that goes on hurting, which is the part that makes an evening painful.

No, and not by luck. What the radar listens to is tapped before the volume control, so it still hears the sound at full strength while your ears get the capped version. Turning this up costs the radar nothing.

Because how loud a footstep is is how you judge its distance. Flatten that and everything sounds close, which is the same reason a lot of players switch spatial audio off. This is set to catch what actually hurts and leave the rest alone.

It does — that is the control it uses, so you will see the slider move. Move it yourself at any time and it takes your new level as the one to work from. If the app ever stops while it is holding the volume down, the next start puts it back.