Hello. As you may have noticed, things have changed on my end of the spectrum recently. I have not been active for a while, and I am no longer represented by a distorted picture of Sir Daniel Keem. While I have been away, many things have happened and not all of them have been good. I have spent lots of time by myself, and that's given me lots of time to think. I have thought about many topics of greater severity than a video game, but I would like to share my thoughts on this game and where I see it going. Before BeamNG.Drive there was a game some of you may have heard of called Rigs of Rods. Great game, made by the great same people that brought us this game. But I see one very large problem. The game was released on August 11, 2005 and as of today it is December 9, 2016. That is 11 years, 3 months, and 4 weeks. The game is still not a final product as there is no "version 1" as it is still at version 0.4.5.1. Will BeamNG.Drive make it to V1? I hope it does but I would like some input from some staff members. On the topic of version history the last time we got an update was quite a while ago. I don't know about the rest of you but I think that we should get more frequent, smaller updates rather that a big one very 1-2 months. Just my opinion, It probably doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. So that was my little "rant" if you will, although like I said, I'm not angry. I would just like my opinion to be heard. Now on to what two things you can expect to see from me in the coming time: -More activity: I will try to be on the forums every day if I can but no guarantees. -Mods: I will be releasing a skin pack and maybe some configurations that could be cool or just interesting. That's all for now, Goodbye. TL;DR: Some random kid from the forums needed to express his feelings.
I prefer the big update every month or two. It isn't like we'll get new vehicles every little update anyway. Although we've had the guy working on sounds for 4-6 months, and no progress has been announced to us yet.
Sweet gig. I wish I was the guy getting paid 6 months to Still have the covet sound like a cheap vacuum cleaner and the v8 sound like something out of grand theft auto 3. I could care less if that was seen to be in poor taste, grab a god damned sm57 and mic up a few cars as hold overs.
He's almost certainly been doing work, just behind the scenes and it isn't ready for release yet. But with 6 months(+) work I hope the sounds are realistic. With diesel trucks etc sounding realistic.
Honestly I don't know what to expect. as it stands now here is how I absurdly and falsely imagine the cause of the sounds currently packaged with beam. the owners of the Company are sitting around smoking cigarettes or drinking coffee or whatever the prevailing stereotypical behavior is for Germans in this case, and one asks the other "OK everything is coming along nicely, but we need sounds for the cars. how should we know what they should sound like?" developer number 2 sais "let's make them sound like they did in every ps1 game ever" except all in German and all before 9 am. come on guys throw us ANY sonic bone please.
I think that BeamNG.drive is now developing faster than ever before. Just looking at developer section - there are so many things going on right now. Current engine sounds are repetitive and sometimes annoying, but after wrapping a car around a tree and looking at in in slow motion I can easily forgive that. I think that big update is easier and more time-efficient thing to do for developers, because after each update there is a lot of feedback and many bugs to be fixed. I haven't ever devoloped anything and I don't plan to, so that's just an opinion. I don't know if we would like an update every two weeks which often only contains some under-the-hood stuff which can barely be noticed.
are you serious? what we have now are placeholders. If you think its easy/not a big deal to make sounds for cars , do it yourself. If they actually record sounds , the recording itself is already really time consuming. they have to get into a super quiet place , get cars and equipment. do you think this takes like 3 days or what? We already have proof that theres a sound guy in the beamng team , who is probably doing his best. Even making artifical sounds which actually sound decent is anything but easy. You just sound so damn disrespectful and i really cant stand such people.
Wow, encouraging people. Keep it up. EDIT: sounds are horrible complex. Things are not as easy as one might think they are...
That's all perfectly fine, but I won't sit here and be told this is rocket science when I know 2 educated audio engineers who could easily throw something together in 3 days let alone 3 months. I'm not asking for forza level sound quality in 3 days, but your WAY out of your element if you think a decent placeholder can't be had with a 100 dollar mic (shure sm57) in 72 hours. if I come off as disrespectful, I'm not. I'm being demanding for one reason. I expect more from this game and I hold it to a much higher standard, because every other aspect of this has made huge strides since I payed my 25 bucks over 3 years ago EXCEPT the engine sounds. I'm an audio guy, and maybe not everyone is but a lesson needs to be taken from gran turismo. I learned a few things doing construction management in Manhattan the most important being this: when a sub contractor tells me he can do 100 percent and I demand 400 percent in the same time frame, I usually ended up with 200 percent at the end of the day. by being unreasonable and demanding, I doubled productivity. give me the mic and and a few grand I'll go to car dealerships and speak with management. I'll give them a few hundred to come In after hours (dead silent) and record sound samples for 2 hours and leave. I'll do that 3 times in 3 days at 3 dealerships until I have the material I need to fix the problem. a few hours in post production and it's off to the next guy to be included in the next update. polyphony digital recently hired the sound designer responsible for forza's sound because they knew they had to fix it. who did these guys hire? try to take my abrasive tone here with a grain of salt because this is still being very polite for a new yorker. I like the guys who make this game and appreciate their work every day I enjoy it. most of my criticisms here are very positive. this is one issue I'm passionate about, and I hope whoever signs the paychecks over there starts using the whip more often.
Real bounds have been made in sound already, with the new system the Covet uses (samples =/= sound system) and suspension creaks. The creaks alone do a whole lot to create a more authentic driving feel, it feels a lot more like I'm actually driving a car and pushing it because the suspension responds and creaks when it's being pushed too far. Sound programming is nowhere near the same as recording new samples. I'm sure that whoever is working on the sound system is working very hard to make sure the whole thing actually works before they try to feed newer sound samples into it. The whole aim of BeamNG is authenticity, so why would you want the sound triggers and scripting to be anything other than authentic too? EDIT: The fact that I can drop samples in from Forza and have it sound this good in a matter of an hour: Means that the hard work already done so far on the audio system has already paid off. I barely had to do any work besides adjusting parameters because the devs have already made such a good system.
Dude. You know it's at 0.7 right? And I don't care how long the sound take, as long as they are good, it'll be worth it. And with this team, I know it's going to be good. Keep up the good work @tdev and team
I think he talked about rigs of rods and not beamng, but then again that is also incorrect as a quick look into the ror page shows that the latest version is 0.4.7.0 Also here is a copy of the devblog from june on what sounds that are planned. Some of the sounds mentioned here have been made and some haven't: We got an audio specialist (Sebastian) now that is doing research on how we can improve our game sounds. Current topics being worked on (these should not be expected soon): Models for different surfaces Model for engine sounds created with Max/MSP Various car interior sounds: handbrake, indicator, gear shift, horn, light, hazard light Destruction sounds: model for car being on fire, tire bursting First attempts to create realistic, interactive tire squeals Sounds for blow-off-valves, turbos and superchargers Focus will now be on the implementation side and making the assets created so far work in game, then improving the assets and sound system
This seems awfully philosophical for a video game form full of 12yr olds talking about their beloved oboes that they're gonna play in their holiday concert.
To reply to OP Rigs of Rods != BeamNG.Drive Two different projects, dealt in different ways. Rigs of Rods was 100% based on volunteers basically. It is an opensource project. The game is free and nobody gets paid to develop it. BeamNG.Drive is a commercial project. There are people working on it daily and so on.
Concerning the stereotype. I'm writing this from Athens Greece. The team includes people from more than 10 countries (with the top count-wise being Germany and Greece). Due to that, English is our lingua franca. Concerning current sound status, i agree with you, the engine sounds are not pretty. Concerning how to solve the current sound status. This is where things will require a little bit more exposition. It isn't just a matter of recording engine samples. These will need to be post-processed so that they mix together correctly to sound like a single engine and not like multiple different engines playing at the same time. This is not easy. It requires both work on the samples and in the sound engine/subsystem. In our case it is even harder than for a regular game. Remember that cars in BeamNG are dynamic. You can rip out the exhaust for example, so the engine's sound would have to change. A solution would be to have different sample packs for all the different situations. But that would get out of hand very quickly. So a lot of thinking and researching is going into the whole thing. Also due to how CPU intensive our physics are, we also need to pay a lot more attention in the CPU utilization of the sound subsystem. Meaning that we cannot afford to have 10-20 channels/samples playing at the same time just for the engine. That would start to seriously reduce the CPU budget that is required by the physics. So we need extra research to find the best trade-of that achieves good enough quality with minimum CPU utilization. Remember we are a small team, trying to do big things. Apart from all the cutting edge physics work that we do there are complexities everywhere. For example, the replay subsystem essentially compresses 3d video in realtime. This is a very hard topic, which isn't solved yet. It required (and still requires) a lot of research work to be able to achieve the kind of compression ratios that we've achieved. Another example that we are putting a lot of work is the real driving AI, that drives with the same physics and exactly the same cars as a human is. Essentially we are trying to replicate self driving cars but with the added complexity that we need our AI to be able to race (close to the edge of a car's abilities), on a constantly changing route (our AI doesn't only work on racetracks) vs driving in a conservative way inside the safe zone like the car industry is focused on (with vastly more resources than us). So, for a small team, trying to do things like that, means that priorities need to be set and followed. This means that some things will need to be pushed back. And finally. There are functional dependencies between all these things. For example engine sounds depend on the engine/powertrain physics simulation to drive them. It wouldn't be easy to work on the engine sound subsystem while the ground underneath it (engine/powertrain physics) is being radically changed...
I appreciate you explaining all of that. I know a bit about what goes into post production, and I know it's not easy, but every single part of the game has been revamped a number of times and I was just wondering. I demand a lot, and so far every demand has been met. I also realize you don't want to change the sounds until you are absolutely satisfied with them and don't have to change them again. as long as I can voice my concerns here in a rediculous way and get assurances, I'll always believe. pro tip: you don't need to start your own threads, just hijack other people's.
