http://www.tracktimeaudio.com/?p=322 I found this blog via the May 2012 issue of Game Developer Magazine (in which there was an article on sound in racing games). Although it really doesn't have anything to do with what 'we' would consider "sim" games; I think it's a great direct comparison from the games that do tend to put more resources into audio design. The rest of the blog is pretty cool, too--getting into recording techniques, etc. Have a look/listen. (I don't know about you guys, but for me, from that study and from my own experience, Forza really seems to have the best sound in racing games...although the GTR3 teaser has me very hopeful as well) Note: I am in no way, shape, or form affiliated with the website listed above.
I think sound in racing games is a tricky one. I can't really name any game that really nails it because if they did, they would be mimicking 100+ decibels of noise, most sound completely artificial, the only sim sounds ive been impressed by came from either a simbin title or a mod for rFactor.
David from Track Time Audio here -- glad to see you enjoyed the article! When it comes to non-sim games like Forza and etc., it's impossible to truly mimic the sound of a real car on the average player's listening system (which typically is built in TV speakers). Plus, the idea is to have people continually play the game, not to be put off by just how harsh reality is. What games like that attempt to accomplish is the emotion and the "feel" of driving such a car, without being the real thing. It's like sound effects in film; Indiana Jones's handgun does not realistically sound like the cannon used for the sound effect, but the emotional response is on par. There is also the compromise between actual sound and perceived sound. For example, the amount of people who have actually sat in a real race car, with a real helmet, listening to real race car sounds, is quite low. by contrast, significantly more people have watched a race on TV or on Youtube and seen the "on-board" camera shot with the corresponding sound. If you asked the general public what the inside of a racecar sounds like, they'd most closely associate it to that on-board camera sound, because that's the closest they've ever heard. So as a game designer, the challenge is do you use the actual sound or do you use the sound of most common perception? This issue carries over to simulator racing as well. I've heard some really excellent rfactor sound mods that use on-board footage as source audio, and it sounds like, well, on-board footage -- which is really cool -- but is not reality. As a sidenote, I am knee deep in my own fun little project. I have conducted a dyno recording session with my 1985 190E-16v as I want to put what I've learned through my time running TTA to action. My end goal is to use the sounds in a sound mod for GTR2 using the 90's DTM mod as the graphical basis. So far things are looking really good. More info on that here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/69968530/record-audio-of-a-car-via-dyno-for-use-in-racing-v and some youtube vids: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c61o-3VbZ8U -- from the recording session http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBfte1URBA4 -- test run using FMOD, a common game sound design middleware tool. If you have more questions or thoughts please, by all means, PM me or comment on TTA or find me on twitter @tracktimeaudio -- personally I'm much more into the sim and into the touring car stuff than most people!
In terms of console games, the sound engine may not be as technically good as Forza 4's, but in terms of pure engine sounds and the ferocity of them Project Gotham Racing 4 destroys everything. If you ever played it you'll know what I'm talking aboutM. Crank PGR 4, and then go crank another game, it won't sound as crazy. The FXX, the F50 GT1, the Aero SSC, etc etc etc, they sound MAD in that game, raw and mean, rough and brutal sounding, but they don't sort of fake it by making their audio super distorted to give the “sense“ of super loudness. In terms of technical sound engine itself I hear that battlefield bad company 2 and battlefield 3 are some of the best. I have bad company 2 and when set up properly through my panasonic mini system speakers comming through a very good sound card it sound BRILLIANT for a video game. You can tell there is much much more “going on“ and being calculated in that games sound than most if not all. That's xactly what we need, a team devoted and dedicated to bringing sound design much further, just like battlefield are. I know their team is HUGE and so is there budget, but I believe having the right few ppl in a small team can achieve great things if they have the brains and know how for that particular field, although money and a bigger team definetely helps. On a side note, people need to really start focusing on off throttle and partial throttle sounds, most of the times they sound like crap and super synthesized and very weak and “thin“ compared to the full throttle sounds, and most race cars especially the older back in time you go where super loud and mean off or partial throttle aswell, of course not as much as full throttle though. I LOVE sound stuff and feel its messed up soooo often (like in the transformers movies when a giant tank shoots and all it makes is a little “ping“ sound, yet they get praised for their audio, please lol). I'm thinking about getting into sound engineering / audio post production at on of the art institutes or film schools but they all want 30 thousand for a 12 month course and I hear sooooooooo much bad stuff about these privately funded schools, and doesn't look like regular colleges have these kind of programs
For me thats closer to reality then to muffle the sound artificially to mimic a helmet. Since thats how it really sounds in the cockpit! Then its up to the user to lower the volume or even put on a helmet, heh.
I don't know how many have seen this video already, but I think it does a great job in delivering the audio that's needed for driving a simulator (even if the quality of the sound is a bit on the synthesized end of the spectrum). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zpCT-GgAYk I think it's particularly successful with the shifting sounds, the way the engine reacts to the changing torque/load when going over bumps, and the subtlety of the tires when they're starting to lose grip. Maybe it's not the best at any of these, but, like I said, I think it does a really good job of putting everything together to provide good feedback.
Another point to consider is how the sound itself is being generate. Is it a static recording that is repeated, and has its pitche adjusted relative to the RPM? Or is it a completely procedurally generated sound that actually mimicks engine load instead of just RPM? I know LFS gets a LOT of flack for its sound engine, but it's the only title I know of where I can truly hear the load on the engine; not just the RPM increasing. It doesn't sound 'realistic' in a conventional sense, but it gives you much, much more information about what the engine, and thus the car, is going through. As a result, it's a much more useful tool and more realistic because of it, imho. The problem with just modifying a clip of an engine is that you will never get the perception of the engine under different loads. It sounds 'prettier,' but it's not as helpful to the driver. Other effects can also be important. I've never heard a racing game with a proper doppler effect, for example, and that is something that would be pretty awesome. Especially in replays/trackside cameras. Preference, of course, is everything. And everyone has their own.
Netkar pro and I think richard burns rally use that system as well. Although you can tell different loads in the more traditional style as I belive it blends fromm off throttle to mid throttle to full throttle sounds depending on throttle position, I'm speculating this by the way
The irony here is that Nick Wiswell was the audio lead for the PGR series, and was hired by Turn 10 as the audio lead for Forza 4 (after Mike Caviezel was moved to a more broad position, formerly audio lead for FM 2 & 3) or lasers that make sound in space, c'mon nothing makes sound in space -- I touched on this already, but sound plays a much more important role in conveying emotion and feel and mood than just replicating reality. The number of important sound cues in film that have no bearing on reality are staggering and too lengthy to discuss here I'm sure. The reality is if sound was only used to only convey what is real, movies would seem boring and lifeless, or "documentary"ish. The same argument also applies to games. For games like Forza, Dirt, etc. the game is targeting the average game player, who can suspend disbelief for the sake of an emotional experience. For the crowd here (as far as I gather) though, I feel you guys would prefer the documentary flavor. The issue there is that's such a small market share out of all the people who play racing games, that most producers who have the staff and resource budget to pull it off deem such a project unprofitable. I'm not 100% sure who's done the mercedes system, but the Redbull simulator sound was done by Greg Hill of Soundwave Concepts. (He is also credited as lead sound for iRacing and a number of other sims IIRC.) I interviewed him about that and some other things a while ago. You might find it interesting that the sound playback system they're using is based on rFactor Pro. http://www.tracktimeaudio.com/?p=147 This has been one of the most hotly debated concepts in car sound in games (and beyond car games, too). Procedural audio is just a fancy word for synthesized. Watch some footage of very, very old racing games and you'll hear that they're just using 1 or 2 square wave snyths that move in pitch to get the basics of engine behavior. This worked great in 1980, but the demand for realism meant having to find a new method. That came as looped-sample based soundbanks, currently the most widely used technique. Typically the sound team records a car (either on a dyno or on a road) at different load and at different RPM intervals, and then the samples are cut into loopable bits that can then be cycled across in the game. Significant advances in synthesizer technology, though, are bringing back the procedural method, using a technique called "granular" synthesis. Granular synthesis takes one very short (usually 5-10ms) "grain" or sample and uses its waveform as the basis for the snyth-ing. The most prominent example of this is the Gran Turismo series, but a better sounding version (in my opinion, at least) is anything out of the Need For Speed series. (EA's former audio lead for the entire franchise, Charles Deenen, has been a large proponent of using synthesis.) In terms of console games, the decision to use one technique or the other is actually based on the hardware limitations of the console itself. If you use a looped-sample system, doing so will require large amounts of hard drive and RAM space to keep all of the samples loaded, but not require much in the way of computer processing. Synthesis requires very little in the way of drive and RAM space, but at the cost of a significantly greater amount of processing. These restrictions have to be balanced with the physics engine and graphics engine, and unfortunately the age of platforms like the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 are reaching their limit. I've heard plenty of perfect doppler. What I don't hear is proper reverb. By that I mean.... well, listen to this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW-aQqDZgeA -- before the cars go whipping by you can actually hear the sound of the car in reverb before it gets to you. (Granted this video is a bit of an exaggeration as many of the sounds came from an empty track grandstand area). That reverb is what game designers haven't been bothered with, and for good reason -- the amount of time players spend watching replay mode is so miniscule compared to time in normal game mode, that the normal game mode is where all the attention is placed. Would you really enjoy a game that had awesome replays but the normal playing mode was only so-so? I'm not saying it's right, and I'm not saying it's not a detail that designers and players care about. I just hope to clarify why things are the way they are in the industry the way we sit right now.
gran turismo is a good example of great replay sound but poor incar sounds... gt5 is much much better then pc sims from the outside. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk-wYu0egog and this is just youtube sound, on my 5.1 speakers its even better...
David, you might be interested to follow this thread, where is build of your car to our rFactor 2, maybe you could be interested to co-operate with modder to help create something truly good? : http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.php/5261-WIP-Mercedes-190E-EVO-EVO2-DTM-DRM-rFactor-2-By-Gvioulspea Sounds are one of the most important aspect in creating feel of being there, it is one aspect of modding that has so little information floating around. I need to look into blog with time. I have read EA's guide for sound recording and it has lot of good points also, sadly my equipment is poor quality mic in at laptop and 9€ microphone from chinese dealextreme.com shop, which might not be quite enough, but this sound creation is something I have always wanted to learn.
Hey, that's really awesome! Thanks for the link, definitely interested. Sound fascinates me because it has all the facets of technical work but with the creativity of art, which for a person like me is perfect. My career aspirations are pointing me toward sound in car games, hopefully sooner than later. The reason there's not a ton of info floating around is because it's very tough to get the sample material right. It's not something you can do without access to the car in question, which usually involves contracts and insurance and etc. with the owner (when discussing former race cars). On top of that, the recording process is not as glamorous as, say, photography which is relatively more enjoyable to start (buy camera, take photos, share with friends, learn from others, continue) -- even though the process is nearly the same. (buy microphone and recorder, make recordings, ????, learn from the few limited resources, continue). In your particular case, though, I refer to the old addage that a painter never blames his brushes -- if you can get yourself a great sounding car, and you can get the microphone in just the right place, and you can drive/get a driver to drive it just right, you can make some spectacular recordings with cheap microphones. And actually, for car recordings, cheaper is better as the equipment is subject to heat and vibration and high SPL anyway.
Yes... just YES. LFS did that wonderfully. On downshifts it was possible to "feel" (by hearing ) how much you were actually braking on the engine. You could hear the rear tyres losing or gaining grip under threshold braking and downshifting. Especially when you use the clutch and H-shifter you need that info to make things smooth. There's so much information to be had that's not conveyed in sims that use pre-recorded samples. Intake sounds and exhaust pulses were all dynamic parts of the LFS sound engine.
See I got good taste lol Yes but I understand how some things cant be too real as it might boring and un-engaging for the casual audience (like your laser in space example), but in my tank example, I was talking the other way around, when they SHOULD be making the sounds big, alive and complex, yet when this monster tank in transformers shoots its massive cannon and everyone is scared ****less, well, all you end of hearing is this almost muted and thin PING, when that should have ROCKED your home theatre system. I probably saw this 40 times in just one transformer movie alone, hard to find a movie with awesome sounds. The machine guns sound like little mighty might firecrackers popping away, etc etc I could keep on going and going. As for car sounds, I believe the casual listener would like it just as much as the hardcore, because realistic car sounds are awesome, I mean a cars sound is one of the main things that attracts people to them, as im sure you obviously know. Especially insanely loud and orgasmic sounding race cars.
If I watch video of car from youtube and can feel table vibrating, then extract audio and put it to rfactor car, for some reason sound becomes quite bit thinner, even it is as loud as before, so far only way I have been able to restore what I hear is add slight bass boost to samples. No matter what is reason for that, but sound just is not coming out quite the way sample sounds, maybe it is scaling to rpm or whatever, but only solution to that so far I have found is to make sample sound bit wrong when played from editor, too much bass and from rfactor it sounds like original in editor. GTR2 and rFactor are virtually same in terms of sounds I believe, GTR might have some added sound effect though, not sure of that, I don't know GTR2 so well.
Another important part of real in-car sound that is normally not reproduced enough in sims/games are all sounds besides engine and transmission sound. Tyre screetching for example you hear a lot in Sims...in real life, inside the car, it depends of the tyres. While you hear street legal tyres screaming in pain you don´t hear anything from slicks, only if you spin out (and then quite loud). But an effect which is really loud in real life, especially with slick tyres, are things hitting the car, like rubber that flies of the tyres and stones being thrown up. In a touring car (don´t know about formula cars) those sounds are heard very good, also over all the engine roar. I never drove any racing sim/game where this is reproduced close to reality.
Street cars in reality have mostly wind noise at higher speeds, exhaust note too, but wind noise is the dominant noise, this also depends from car, but above 100kph it should be very clearly audible drowning lot of more quiet noises under it. Tire's rolling noise is also something often missing, both of those are however important part of that being there feeling. Tire noises change a lot as one drives on road that has those long hardly visible to eye bumps and drops, you can hear lower or higher surface pressure as it changes tone and volume of sound coming from tires, has any sim this feature? Also different part of road has different texture roughness that produces different sound from tires. When you brake bit harder you can hear stronger rolling noise from tires. It is those small things that will make awesomeness in sound experience I believe and so far I don't think any sim has focused on those? Race car without sound proofing and with threaded tires has lot of different tire noises that can't be heard engine screaming, but blow engine and at cornering you should be able to hear those tire rolling noises in race car really well. I did watch some club level racing video from youtube really long time ago, there rolling noise from tires was very clear when cornering and braking, sound blended smoothly to tire squeal then at harder cornering. I guess it would be possible to make pluging to play sound based on tire load of course, but that is beyond my skill.
Lots of great info in there, thanks! I believe LFS uses the granular method as well. I can't speak to the quality of the NFS system, but in LFS I really do get a good sense for the loads on the engine that is (from what I've heard in other games) impossible from sampled sounds. The sampled ones sound prettier, but the synth ones convey more information. I guess that comes down to your point of realism vs. emotion. For most racing games, the emotion is the important part. For hardcore sims, though, maybe the realism and conveyance of information is more important? Either way, I've never felt as connected with the car in any sim as I have been with LFS. That right there is the sole reason the sim was so popular. If one of the current games can somehow achieve that connection and tie it with other more advanced technologies, they'll have a winner. rF2's historic cars have come the closest so far, for me (though I have not yet tried the Clios, or the GT cars; just the Meganes) but they're not quite there yet. Close, though. I've never heard proper reverb, either, but I still don't recall a game with proper doppler. From what I can remember most games just get louder as the car approaches, then quieter after it passes. This is incorrect, isn't it? Which games have a proper doppler effect, I'd like to grab some videos.
^^ I've never played with LFS so I guess I'm missing out! As for doppler shift though, any of the current-gen games pull it off (GT5, Dirt/F1, Forza) perfectly fine (as in the pitch shift, and in the case of GT5 the high-frequency phase change too). There are a number of factors that affect how doppler-y a doppler shift is, though. Distance from the camera, speed of the car, and volume of the source sound (to a small extent) all change how strong of a shift you get. This is something that has always irked me as well, but there's reason behind it. When you drive a real car, your body is being pushed sideways and front to back due to its inertia. You can use your body's physical motion to tell you how hard the car is working. However, when you play a game/sim you aren't getting that action, at all. Or to put that another way, your real car can convey information to you across all 5 senses. A game/sim can only use 2, maybe 3. So almost every sim uses "tire sound" to convey the information that you would normally pick up as physical movement in a real car. Unfortunately, without some amount of overemphasized sound reference, sims would quite literally be impossible to drive fast. As for tire sounds themselves, there is an immense amount of complication into generating the sounds themselves. If you read through the sound study in the OP, you saw that we separated "tire sound" from "surface sound" although in reality the two are practically the same thing. We defined a tire sound as a sound generated by the tire itself, and a surface sound as the sound generated by the thing the tire touches. Realistically, though, the two are intertwined as the tire's vibration that generates a sound should have an equal but opposite vibration from the surface. With that out of the way, we have to think about why tires make sounds in the first place. Let's start with the the most simple sonic model: a slick tire with infinitely stiff sidewalls. In this case, the rubber contact surface has no breaks, which resists most of the sound as there's no space for the rubber to vibrate. If you could have an infinitely stiff sidewall, then there would also be no side-to-side flex, so in theory, this would be a silent tire, with exception of surface contact sound, which we'll talk about here in a second. Move to a tire that has only straight grooves, like F1 tires in the mid-2000's. These grooves allow the rings of tire to vibrate laterally, meaning there will be a sound as the tire scrubs sideways. Think of pushing the tire sideways. The now-leading edge will grip and be stretched until it releases, which causes the vibration. Finally, a street tire with treads that cut across the tire. Now, instead of being a perfect circle, the tire actually acts like a polygon. Imagine if you will, a square tire. Every time the tire would rotate so that a corner approached the ground, the tire would "slap" the road kind of like it was giving the road a high-five. Now make that square a pentagon, and you get more slaps per revolution, but across a smaller surface. Extrapolate that out to the many sides of a road tire (typically 35-50) and you get a collection of small slaps all the time. (If you think back to the slick tire, this actually occurs there too as almost-infinitely-small sides, which is why even slicks have a rolling noise.) Plus, now that the tread is not a perfect ring, the tire is also free to vibrate under accel and decel much more freely. This is where you get the tire hum under breaking from. The problem when it comes to game audio is not only having accurate samples or grains for all of this, but also having a processing system that can react accurately to changing states of behaviour, plus having the physics engine behind it to determine all of the possible states. I believe that even most sims only have a subset of possible tire states, but that is where most of the improvements are stemming from in the games world right now. For example, when I asked Wiswell about it for FM4, he said the game is actively monitoring for each tire: and for each of those parameters there are ranges of parameters (for example, made up numbers: lateral slip <=0°, 0-10°, >=10°) -- then carry this range across all states and very quickly you end up with quite a few possible sounds. (I think I remember reading FM4 has 27 different possible tire sound modes), and then multiply that times every wheel on your car plus other cars on the track and suddenly you have quite a lot of processing to do just for tires! Add engine sounds and now your sound processor is very busy, then add in all your graphic and physics processing and suddenly your CPU is maxed out. PS, I'm not an FM4 fanboy (well ok, maybe a teensy bit) but the audio team at Turn 10 has been the most open with me so it's from them that I have the most information to talk about.
