Note: Claude helped me with this, as my explanation attempt at first was rather... incorrect. That being said, here's the post.
Speaking as a dev who uses this exact timer based footstep system in my own game, I wanted to lay this out because I keep seeing people say our running speed is too fast, and honestly I think that's based on comparing two things that aren't the same at all. In mainstream visual games, footstep audio is tied to animation keyframes, not to actual position data. That animation gets retimed, blended, or sped up independently of how fast the character is really moving. Sprint animations get sped up for impact, footstep cadence gets spaced out so it doesn't clash with music or dialogue. Basically the footstep sound in those games is decoration sitting on top of movement, it's not a direct readout of it. In an audiogame we don't have a visual layer to carry that info, so the footstep sound has to actually do something functional instead of just sounding nice. It fires on a fixed timer tied directly to our X Y Z coordinate updates, because that timer is our only continuous feedback for knowing we're moving and roughly how fast. Take it away and we're not running silently, we're just lost. This isn't theoretical for me either, it's literally how I built movement in my own project. So when someone says our footsteps sound faster than what they're used to, what they're actually comparing is our fixed update timer against another game's animation keyframe spacing. Those are two completely different variables. One is downstream of an animation decision. The other is upstream of us actually knowing where we are. Comparing how often each one fires and drawing conclusions about speed from that is a bit like comparing an engine's RPM sound to a speedometer reading and assuming they move together. They don't, because they're not measuring the same thing. So my take is footstep interval should be treated as a positioning and feedback parameter first, and only secondarily as a "does this feel fast" parameter. If we tuned it to match visual game footstep cadence we'd actually be gutting the thing it's there for. Curious what other devs think though, especially if anyone's tried a different approach to movement feedback that isn't timer based. Open to being told I'm wrong here too.