Audio Feedback Thread

If you read through this thread, I've spoken about it a number of times. In a short summary, we cast out rays to detect where the windows, doors and roof are, what materials (if any) are used to 'deaden' the sound in the cabin and then use an appropriate effect to give the sound of that cabin. If a window is broken, a door open, or there isn't a roof then this should all be reflected by the filtering in real time.

 

Unfortunately, the answer is still a no for the reasons @stenyak explained. I'd love to say we can fix it, I hate bugs as much as anyone else - and rest assured the issue won't be forgotten.

 

Correct. To expand on the situation: our game engine was originally the T3D engine. The audio side of it still carries a ton of baggage and assumptions from 2 decades ago, and is in desperate need of a cleanup. This cleanup would take easily weeks or months IF we could redirect an engine programmer or 2 entirely to this, which is not happening at the moment. This cleanup would result in absolutely zero changes from the perspective of players, or of our audio experts (it would "merely" reduce the pain that us programmers suffer when working on audio). Having said all that, the ability to change audio device on the fly would be somewhere way outside this tunnel we're in, and atm we cannot even see the light at the end the tunnel, so realtime device changes are just unthinkable.

 

There is some form of synthesis involved, and agreed - pretty much everything they supply higher than 7k sounds horribly digital.

 

Pretty sure this was being looked at by @sebaudio and @Diamondback at one point. Can't remember the outcome.

 

Some good points there, thank you

• What would "race traction control" sound like? reference videos appreciated.
• I've already raised ABS from an audio POV as I wanted to hear the vibration. Our current ABS system doesn't quite work like that since its based on the most modern ABS techniques no matter how 'old' the ABS would be in any particular vehicle. @Diamondback can explain further.
  
• Suspension bump stops. Yep, the suspension system already supports this, so I just need to create the right sounds for it.
• Separate events for skids. So *grin*... this is the only project I've worked on where the skid system is based on a single event. That event has to cater for locking, spinning and sliding, whereas traditional a "game" would have separate events. It's not impossible to do this, however I feel that the Beam way to do skids is to have a single event, and it's all about how that event is manipulated to create the different sounds consistently that they are coming from a single object... a tyre... other games end up having the tyre making three different sounds overlayed on top of each other, and I want to avoid that. There is much research for me, and indeed others, to do in this area. I completely consider the skids currently to be a WIP where we do at least have some form of subtlety to aggressiveness, and of course supporting different types of tyre.
• I still don't understand what is meant by surround here, as we run in surround sound. The only thing I can think of is that ACC uses stereo loops for it's engine samples, whereas we use mono loops. Since we use over 80 loops for an engine model, I have little interest in trying to fake them to stereo, but I am considering a DSP process to do this instead. This is exactly what I designed for the racing games at Codemasters from DiRT 2 onwards, where the actual RPM sweeps are mono and we processed them in real time to create a pseudo-stereo version.
• Beam don't tend to do temporary solutions.

 

We're all hoping for it. It is planned, but the priority isn't so high as other game features which are higher.