Wake up call for sound engine :)

Discussion in 'Wish Lists' started by K Szczech, Apr 24, 2015.

  1. K Szczech

    K Szczech Registered

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    Yes, that's why I appreciate S3 Studio's efforts and want to encourage ISI to consider it when setting priorities.
     
  2. Fabio Pittol

    Fabio Pittol Registered

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    Hopefully now that the new contact patch model is going gold, and probably not much later on we'll get the "flexible" rules system, ISI will have more "spare" :cool: time to take a look at some underdog features.
     
  3. K Szczech

    K Szczech Registered

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    Wet weather racing will probably come first, which I don't mind at all.
    I can give up sound improvements completely for now to get decent dynamic weather simulation and visualization (not fancy effects, but clearly readable representation of road conditions).

    The same way I don't need car body deformation as damage visualization - for as long as accidents have consequences (broken suspension etc.) it's enough for solid racing experience.

    I don't expect ISI to drop everything and focus on sounds only because competitors are focusing on this subject. We can clearly see that rF2 has some serious advantages of it's own. But it may be the right moment to consider it and place it somewhere in the roadmap of rF2 development. Especially now, that simracing community got the taste of it from S3 Studios :)
     
  4. Spinelli

    Spinelli Banned

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    +1 Driving physics and physics that affect driving ("RealWorld" system, etc. etc.) over everything else. If only ISI were bigger/bigger budgeted and had a guy who's sole focus is the sound engine.
     
  5. Nitrometh

    Nitrometh Registered

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    +1 propper sound would increase the real life feeling. I think one of the most impressive thing of motorsport is the brutal sound of the beasts.
     
  6. Promag

    Promag Registered

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    It's all about the sample, not the engine. ISI engine is high enough in fidelity.
     
  7. K Szczech

    K Szczech Registered

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    I disagree it's all about samples. That's why I started this thread.

    I wouldn't hear such a huge difference between being to real life race and watching replay of a race in simulator. The difference is huge. When we went to a GT race with our friends from racing league, we were on a parking lot few hundred meters from racing track and the sound of cars carrying over the forest was so lovely. Our reaction was the same: "We have been cheated!" (referring to what we hear in simulators :) ).

    Even if the attenuation in game engine is mathematically 100% correct it will not be enough, because we would have o set our speakers so loud, they would be capable of producing the same level of noise a real car engine produces. I don't think we would have to wait long until some nice police officer knocks on our door.

    The output range problem in graphics has been solved by introduction of HDR. Sound engines don't yet have equivalent technology - they're a couple of years behind and getting rusty.
     
  8. woochoo

    woochoo Registered

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    Is audio compression (as in a "compressor" for dynamics, rather than data) not similar or equivalent technology? I don't know how RaceRoom does it, but I can imagine some DSP combination of compression, reverb, and variable filtering based on distance of the sound source could do something similar to real life, and mashed down within the dynamic range suitable for home use. Not perfectly the same, but it's about making it relatively the same for home use. I don't know how proc-intensive DSP is these days though. I recall reverb was always a bit of a killer.

    I expect there are plenty of journal articles on frequency response variation over distance (attenuated by air). Some smooth blending between direct and reverb signal based on distance. And compression to increase the volume of distant direct/reverbed sound, which would be pushed down by closer cars as the came closer.

    And as mentioned, separate sources/samples for the front and the rear of the cars would be cool :)
    And from PCARS i'd like to hear muffled helmet/earplug sound mode too
     
    Last edited by a moderator: May 21, 2015
  9. Promag

    Promag Registered

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    "even if the attenuation in game engine is mathematically 100% correct it will not be enough, because we would have o set our speakers so loud, they would be capable of producing the same level of noise a real car engine produces. I don't think we would have to wait long until some nice police officer knocks on our door".


    There is a difference between amplitude (loudness) and spectrum (frequencies) You can get a lot of sound out of a set of headphones. With your theory, I would not be able to mix or record a song and leave the listener the feeling he was right there with the band. Concerts can exceed 125 db on a regular basis. Thats pretty frickin loud. Just like in most media business the budget is lower for audio than video. So they get what they pay for.

    As for RRE, I can hear heavy compression (Data and dynamic range) on their samples. To me the sounds are good but they are still a picture of what the car sounds like. RF2 has the most open ended sound engine. The compression and limiting that you hear in AC and RRE is much more transparent in RF2 and there for has more potential for the modder. It's the samples.
     
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  10. Promag

    Promag Registered

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    Also this might put it in perspective for you. 3 man team, plus car and driver, track or tarmac access for about 12 hours. 15,000 dollars worth of recording equipment and mounts. Would probably cost about $5,000 for one car. There is always ways to do it cheaper but if somebody came to me with a real budget that would be my quote. That's not including the editing for the game.

    So now you know why they use video hacked samples and tone generators. That is not a slam on the DEVs, just reality of the biz. I do sound for movies and television, and have many decades in the music business. Nobody wants to pay for sound. We struggle for every dime and the budgets have been dropping for years.:D
     
    Last edited by a moderator: May 22, 2015
  11. K Szczech

    K Szczech Registered

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    I understand that, but sample quality and recording techniques is not why I started this thread :)

    Game engines must deal with processing power limitations. That's why we have limit on number of sounds played simultaneously, just like we have limits on number of lights illuminating one surface. To stay within this limit, light sources as well as sound sources have less effective range in game engines.
    While further light range can be complex to achieve without modern rendering techniques, longer sound range is possible since sound is just 40-50k samples per second and picture is often millions of pixels in 16 milliseconds for fluent animation. Sure we get help from powerful GPUs to deal with picture, but sound could also be processed on GPU and even CPUs have lot's of computing power nowadays, comparing to what we had in mid 90's.

    So I'm not talking about the sound quality, but about the simple fact, that we can hear a loud car from well over 1 km in reality and only like 200m in game (which is often only twice the distance from trackside camera to racing circuit anyway).

    And that's why I started this thread.
     
  12. Spinelli

    Spinelli Banned

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    It's not about volume levels of speakers. I can watch a real-life video at very low volume levels and it still sounds amazing, brutal, realistic, complex, etc. Obviously higher volume levels are better though, don't get me wrong ;)
     
  13. Guimengo

    Guimengo Guest

    Walking up to Monza and hearing the GP2 cars from km away, and the same at Spa with the engines reverberating through the mountains from very far away was awesome. I miss that.
     
  14. Promag

    Promag Registered

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    I am confused, which is pretty common:D. This seems like your looking for an absolute perfect vr audio environment. This would be akin to a virtual tire physics for sound. To recreate all the nuances of a naturally acoustic soundscape would be impressive but we are ways off. One concept is phase cancelling. It happens all the time in real life, you just don't know it, 2 sounds cancelling each other out. There are people working on accurate virtual sound environments (NASA) but it is even more complex than graphics. I personally would be tickled pink just to have high quality samples, I can trick you in a 5.1 matrix mix in to believing somethings real but not with out absolutely fantastic samples not just because how they sound but how they interact with other sounds . Oh my This is a rabbit hole of a subject for me. I can feel you thoughts because they resonate at a certain freq, but I can't hear them. I think the v8 stock car in GSCE is pretty good though. LOL.
     
  15. K Szczech

    K Szczech Registered

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    I don't think we're after absolutely perfect environment just yet :)

    There may be some occluders involved, there may be some processing involved - just to give distant sounds that little extra something. Or you can just have separate samples recorded for distant cars (which is what I believe R3E is doing). It doesn't matter - for as long as sound engine cuts off distant sounds completely you won't hear any of that.

    I think you exaggerate a lot, because you still don't understand what we're asking for. We're only looking for a way to hear distant sounds, not for a complex sound propagation engine. Go to the first post of this thread - R3E is doing just that - simple, but it's enough.
     
  16. Ozzy

    Ozzy Registered

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    Does anybody know if and when ISI will complete multi channel audio? I was so excited seeing the options for 5.1 in the first builds for rF2 followed by the disappointment that it is not working followed by the expectation it will be added in the next builds. 900 builds later it is still not there. :-(
     
    Last edited by a moderator: May 24, 2015
  17. Ozzy

    Ozzy Registered

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    Just tried the new R3E update with the new backfire system, rev limiter and drivetrain flex. Wow! How the flex leads to gear wobbling is so dynamic! I think in this case R3E is ahead of rf2 even in terms of physics.

    Anybody knows if ISI's new drivetrain model will support flex?
     
  18. K Szczech

    K Szczech Registered

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    That's offtopic :) (a.k.a. top secret or classified)
     
  19. drewdc90

    drewdc90 Registered

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    Realistic sound would be the most immersive thing for rfactor 2 to have (probably more so than graphics if you think about it), the main thing is getting the right samples and using them the right way. I've read someone talking about how the sound that would come from the back of the car is different to the front (completely different), that's a basic mistake in the sound for rf2. Another is the rpm bounce that happens when seq gearbox change gears (like a champ car does), that's a simple thing to capture but is highly immersive. Another basic issue is the processing that happens within the environment, the reverbs are usually the wrong type of reverb and often have the wrong frequency damping and so the space that the car is in is alien and doesn't sound like what you'd expect from what you see. The processing that happends based from rpm can be pretty basic sounding also though getting the right samples for this is probably more where the issue stands. The thing is some cars sound great onboard so that shows the engine isn't bad but the samples and their placement. Hopefully a real sound designer gets involved and puts your ears in the simulation as well.
     
  20. stonec

    stonec Registered

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    Disagree, the samples are from sound guru Greg Hill and they are arguably the best in consumer sim industry, also used by iRacing, pCars, etc. (notably not by AC). Sound engine itself is lacking behind iRacing, it's basically rF1 sound engine with better attenuation and reverb effects added.
     

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