The way Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines handles ambient audio is really weird.
Instead of using Source's soundscape system they seem to have duct taped together their own system (possibly using some of the soundscape code as a base?) that operates based on "sound schemes."
Sound schemes are somehow simultaneously slightly more useful than soundscapes while also being really really dumb. They allow you to define a continuous ambient sound, the default music, alert music and combat music. Useful stuff.
Just like soundscapes, you can also of course define a set of random ambient sound effects that can be played. But where soundscapes would let you assign specific points from which random ambient noises can be played, soundschemes do it... a little differently.
Instead of playing sounds from specific points, VtMB plays its sounds at random locations, based on the position of both the player and soundscheme entity (ambient_soundscheme). An example entry might look like this:
RandomSound
{
"Filename" "environmental/city/car alarm.wav"
"PitchMin" "95"
"PitchMax" "110"
"Volume" "70"
"Frequency" "10"
"AudibleRadius" "2000" // when played, the sound will be attenuated so that it can be heard from this far away
"DistMin" "700" // the sound will be played at a point no less than this distance from the player
"DistMax" "1300" // the sound will be played at a point no farther than this distance from the player
"HeightMin" "0" // the sound will played no lower than these many units below the sound scheme entity
"HeightMax" "0" // the sound will be played no higher than these many units above the sound scheme entity
}
As you can see, it defines properties such as minimum and maximum distance from the player to play the sound. But also minimum and maximum height from the scheme entity the sound can be played at. Here's an example of the system in action with the debug display on:
Now, this isn't all that bad. Most of the time, it works really well! Especially in a closed testing environment like this.
Out in the field though... it gets a bit weird. There's definitely room for improvement.
There's nothing stopping the areas it chooses to play sounds from being in the playable area, and this means that it can sometimes decide to just play a sound in a location where the player can reasonably approach it and get right up to it. It also results in odd artifacts such as car alarms seemingly emitting from inside buildings. (I'd record footage of this but I can't be bothered right now)
It's not rare either, stuff like the latter happened often enough that it ended up becoming something of a signature part of the game's weird vibes for me by the end of my playthrough.
There's also places where the choices of ambient sound made by the devs are... questionable? Like some interior spaces just having loud ass glass breaking sounds emitting from somewhere outside.
Still, even with its quirks and flaws it's an interesting system. I've been tempted to write a reimplementation of it in Source SDK 2013, or a Unity port compatible with the original KV files.
I'm very curious as to why they chose to use this over soundscapes, though. There isn't a single soundscape entity in the whole game. I can only guess at the reason for this.