Audio Improvements May Not be Ready for Gran Turismo 6 | Kaz Interview

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Tenacious D
Shift 2
119 cars at release, 37 manufacturers

Gran Turismo 5
nearly 1000 unique cars, 60-plus manufacturers, not counting tuner companies and race car variants

Might have something to do with it...
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Once again, their choice. No one forced them to add cars that aren't up to standard just to reach an arbitrary car count number.

Also, you'll find that all of the cars in Shift 2, although there are less off them, are of the same audio/visual quality.

Don't you find it extremely odd that a noted "perfectionist" actually includes separate tiers of both audio and visual quality in his games? Seems kind of the opposite of a perfectionist...
 
Tenacious D
1. That's the situation. Complaining about it changes squat.
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I'd disagree after seeing that GT booklet stating the level of accuracy in the audio of each car. It seems PD was perfectly happy with the audio until their fan base called shenanigans.

When you have audio threads in excess of a couple thousand posts, and then the news that updated audio still won't be ready, I'd say the worst thing the community could do is stay quiet about (at least, for those that audio matters).
 
HAL20XX
I'd disagree after seeing that GT booklet stating the level of accuracy in the audio of each car. It seems PD was perfectly happy with the audio until their fan base called shenanigans.

When you have audio threads in excess of a couple thousand posts, and then the news that updated audio still won't be ready, I'd say the worst thing the community could do is stay quiet about (at least, for those that audio matters).
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Couldn't have said it better!
 
machschnel
Once again, their choice. No one forced them to add cars that aren't up to standard just to reach an arbitrary car count number.

Also, you'll find that all of the cars in Shift 2, although there are less off them, are of the same audio/visual quality.

Don't you find it extremely odd that a noted "perfectionist" actually includes separate tiers of both audio and visual quality in his games? Seems kind of the opposite of a perfectionist...
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I have always found it humourous when people refer to Kaz as a perfectionist. I'm sure he has lofty goals and aspirations and works as hard or harder than I do, and it's impossible to make something as large and complex as a GT game "perfect" or anywhere close to it. But when you release a game with hundreds of decade old cars, a thousand with decade old sound, by choice, I find it absurd to continue to call yourself a perfectionist.
 
Quite incredible that they managed to neglect updating their generic Hoover sounds yet again. All they need to do now is ignore the AI to confirm that they really don't give a crap about what their fan base wants...
 
HAL20XX
I'd disagree after seeing that GT booklet stating the level of accuracy in the audio of each car. It seems PD was perfectly happy with the audio until their fan base called shenanigans.
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Well, that is a different matter. machshnel's point was the car list being unwieldy. Mine was that the car list was wonderful. Each with different perspectives on it.

Complaining is one thing, but faux complaining, i.e. "All the sounds are terrible" or "they managed to neglect updating their generic Hoover sounds yet again" aren't going to win any net cookies with many of us. Or with PD, the people you guys hope to influence.
 
mister dog
Quite incredible that they managed to neglect updating their generic Hoover sounds yet again. All they need to do now is ignore the AI to confirm that they really don't give a crap about what their fan base wants...
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Your crazy, Kaz himself said that they generating new ways to make the sounds, thats no ignoring the fanbase, don't be ingnorant.
 
Tenacious D
Shift 2
119 cars at release, 37 manufacturers

Gran Turismo 5
nearly 1000 unique cars, 60-plus manufacturers, not counting tuner companies and race car variants

Might have something to do with it...
Click to expand...

How is this relevant to the quality of the sounds? Sure, the more cars you have the more time you need to spend overall working on audio, but that's a completely different argument that has nothing to do with system hardware and RAM. And do you really want to compare NFS Shift 1 or 2's development time to GT5's? 5-6 years compared to..... yeah. I guarantee you Shift 2 had way more time devoted to audio than GT5 did even despite that. At least the effort is incredibly higher and that's what matters.

That's just way too defensive of an argument in PD's favour. So they have more cars, so what? As somewhat else mentioned, no one forced them to include 800 standard PS2 level cars (in fact, many opposed it).

A closer comparison would actually be:
242 premium cars, 39 manufacturers (plus "GT" brand and 12 tuner brands all with 1-2 cars)

Plus that includes all the duped NASCARs and I think all the DLC cars (even more NASCAR dupes) except for one car pack. Then add in the fact that many cars reuse the same sound effects...

It's still double NFS Shift 2's car count, but a higher number of cars is irrelevant to the quality of sound simulation. PD has no excuse for not getting this right. I find it a little funny when GT fanboys criticize Forza's sounds -- yes they're not perfect but the cars still don't sound like vacuum cleaners. I'd swap sounds with FM any day.

Furthermore, how do you explain the great sounding cars? Honda HSV, any Pagani Zonda, hell even the M5. Makes no sense that a few of them sound great but the rest sound very poor. People need to stop defending PD and presenting blind theoretical, nonsensical arguments as if the company is a family member. Fact remains: the sound is poor in Gran Turismo and simply put, anyone who disagrees has a wrong opinion. Only because of the uproar are PD trying to change things. Had everyone said nothing and blindly defended PD all along we'd still have no hope of anything. It's only through complaining and raising awareness will things ever get done.
 
mister dog
Quite incredible that they managed to neglect updating their generic Hoover sounds yet again. All they need to do now is ignore the AI to confirm that they really don't give a crap about what their fan base wants...
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liampage123
Your crazy, Kaz himself said that they generating new ways to make the sounds, thats no ignoring the fanbase, don't be ingnorant.
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You must be new to the game then, because after 15 years of waiting and vague "we are looking into the possibilities" statements, you would be tired of the incompetence also ;)
 
Conquerer
How is this relevant to the quality of the sounds? Sure, the more cars you have the more time you need to spend overall working on audio, but that's a completely different argument that has nothing to do with system hardware and RAM.
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How could you completely muck up my point, when you even include it in your very own remark? Oh the humanity... ;)

Anyhow, I think I've stated my points a sufficient number of times. Anyone wishing to respond and engage me further on this, let me refer you ahead of times to remarks I made some moments ago.
 
NFS uses a completely different technique to achieve their car sounds. This technique is referred to as "granular" and codemasters also uses this technique. The way it works is a little bit hard to explain, but I'll try my best. Imagine a dyno pull that ran from 0 RPM to redline over 20 seconds that accelerated perfectly linearly. Save a recording of that pull, and shove that into RAM. Now, hand that over to your CPU while running in game and have it cut the whole thing up into very, very small samples (called "grains") (they're usually sub-10ms in duration, so like one cylinder firing say). In run time, after you play a grain, you can play the same grain again (i.e. holding the same RPM), play the next grain (accelerating or decelerating) or skip a few (accelerating quicker). Another way to think about this is, with the same recording, imagine you had the ability to scroll through it at any speed you wanted to. That's essentially what NFS (and codemasters)' systems do. The benefit is a very small ram budget (just one, albeit somewhat long, recording per car). The downside is a larger CPU expense. It's also very difficult to get recordings that work with this system because the rate of RPM acceleration throughout the file has to be near-constant. The other downside is that there are a lot of ways you can make this sound very bad - the easiest of which is to just hold a steady RPM in-game, as that's where the granular system sounds the least natural.

NFS in particular is an interesting title to talk about, because they calculate their audio "physics" before the car "physics." Or by that I mean, the game calculates what audio is supposed to be sounding like, and then sets the car data to match it. The theory is that in this way, it will never sound bad. The downside is it creates some separation between what you as the player are inputting and what the game feels like it's doing. You'll notice if you try to get a car to hold a steady RPM in the newest Most Wanted, you can't -- the car will either accel just a bit or decel just a bit.


Anyway, could GT switch to a granular system? Sure, but it would be very expensive and very time-consuming to do so. Then again, if the PS3 is making them RAM-limited but there's CPU to spare, it might not be a bad route after all. (But with PS4 already out now, that sounds like a lot of time and money not well spent IMO)
 
The "1000 cars are a lot of cars to record sound for" is a red herring. Kaz is perfectly happy with 200 cars as premiums and 800 that look like they are 10 years old so why not 200 cars with premium sound and standards with standard sound. And with some of the standards one good engine sample could serve many cars. S2000's, Miata's, Skylines, etc. 7 or 8 engine samples could cover 150+ standards, making for around 400 premium sound cars. Yes some people would still complain they weren't all premium, but many more would be quite happy to see progress and then the statement, "Kaz said they are working hard on the sounds" would actually mean something.
 
Tenacious D
How could you completely muck up my point, when you even include it in your very own remark? Oh the humanity... ;)
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Except I shot that point down immediately after I brought it up? It's an irrelevant discussion that has no direct correlation to the quality of the sound -- magically T10 managed to deal with it, didn't they. But they outsource and have more employees! Irrelevant. They have a competent vision/direction and get things done, end of question. PD doesn't and continues to give us "it's technically possible but we're not going to include it" and "we're working on this but it's not ready" rather than "we've done this and it's great."

And you talked about RAM as an excuse, then when questioned you changed your argument to "there's so many cars that they don't have the time!" Why bother talking about time and the amount of cars when the development time was over five years? Sound has always been a weak point in GT and it has barely advanced in 15 years, effectively making it 10 years behind the industry. There's just no excuse anymore, and you're reaching so hard to defend PD so I'm done here.
 
I'm glad you're done, because I'd be repeating myself, and I already addressed both the ordeal of working out THOUSANDS of sound samples, as well as figuring out how to get ample sounds from up to 16 different cars in ram with everything else going on at the same time. When even God's gift to racing games, Turn 10, can't even manage it on the infinitely more powerful and ram stuffed X360.

Good. Night. :P
 
trustjab
You won't find them, you can't even find the sarcasm. So your "jump" was wasted energy. But probably not since it seems your m.o. is to "jump" on people's case who don't share your opinion. You must be a great conversationalist!

I don't think the old process was getting fruitful results. If it were satisfactory why change it?

Thats a simpleton solution. Adding more to anything does nothing without the knowledge of the problem. You hire people on to do something but do they understand what was being done? Focusing the people already in the know is easier than hiring people that need to be clued in to PD's 'formula'. He may have felt the amount of people he had was sufficient to do this change. No one knows the inner workings of GT6.
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Imari
I found the sarcasm. You sarcastically said that 271 did not refer to the size of Kaz's workforce.
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Close, but no. You were talking about staff and numbers, so I sarcastically said the video has a number in there. And when I said "you just said it", I meant you just said Kaz was hiring, therefor he added more people to his staff. No, nothing said he hired anyone for audio, but he has expanded.
mister dog
You must be new to the game then, because after 15 years of waiting and vague "we are looking into the possibilities" statements, you would be tired of the incompetence also ;)
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15 years? I don't think so. These statements you speak of started on the PS3 era.
 
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mister dog
You must be new to the game then, because after 15 years of waiting and vague "we are looking into the possibilities" statements, you would be tired of the incompetence also ;)
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trustjab
15 years? I don't think so. These statements you speak of started on the PS3 era.
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Yes, but that doesn't take away the fact that these aspects have sucked for almost 15 years, and they didn't bother to correct it.
 
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I was going to discuss Chippy's post last night, but wanted to get in a little me-time before bed. I had assumed that most racing game car audio engines had migrated to something granular-istic by now, because it removes those "rolling" loops that have obvious repeats in them. But that has its own challenges because all those granules of sound have to sound like a car and not a buzz, which is the typical result. But this in particular caught my eye.

Chippy569
NFS in particular is an interesting title to talk about, because they calculate their audio "physics" before the car "physics." Or by that I mean, the game calculates what audio is supposed to be sounding like, and then sets the car data to match it. The theory is that in this way, it will never sound bad. The downside is it creates some separation between what you as the player are inputting and what the game feels like it's doing. You'll notice if you try to get a car to hold a steady RPM in the newest Most Wanted, you can't -- the car will either accel just a bit or decel just a bit.
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This doesn't even sound right. I can't imagine any racing sim following this method without a lot of very fast intelligent algorithms to manage it because of consequences like this. There was enough hooplah in Forza over the input buffer which even affected wheel users. Very strange...

Anyway, could GT switch to a granular system? Sure, but it would be very expensive and very time-consuming to do so. Then again, if the PS3 is making them RAM-limited but there's CPU to spare, it might not be a bad route after all. (But with PS4 already out now, that sounds like a lot of time and money not well spent IMO)
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Not necessarily. For one, it seems that GT6 is kind of the proving model for work being done in GT7 for that vastly more powerful and ram endowed PS4. The game engine is even doing tesselation by software on the fly, which is done in hardware on PS4. From what Kaz has said, the entire GT5 engine has been rebuilt from the floor up, so SPEs, Chippy's CPU, were probably divvied up to handle tasks more efficiently, perhaps even freeing up one or two for other purposes like tesselation. And managing audio.

Another thing as Griffith500 pointed out, he or someone dug up a partnership with Yamaha, which are one of the masters of synthesis and sample playback systems in the world today. Their Motif synthesizers are about the most popular keyboard in the world right now, and have taken sample playback technology to a very high level of detail and realism. They are likely working with Polyphony audio engineers to provide that "breakthrough" Kaz is looking for.
 
mister dog
You must be new to the game then, because after 15 years of waiting and vague "we are looking into the possibilities" statements, you would be tired of the incompetence also ;)
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15 years ago people weren't really complaining about the sounds...
 
I've never really been bothered by the sounds, but after constantly reading all these complaints on everything since gt6 was announced I've been paying more attention in other games. I noticed GTA v actually has good sounds. The car that looks like the Audi a4 sounds awesome and if those sort of sounds were in gt6.... I'm happy with good graphics and good racing but nice engine sounds would be a bonus.

P.S. gt5 actually won an award for best sound effects of the year:
http://www.psxextreme.com/feature/665-1.html
(Not really sure how prestigious this is but gt5 still won)
 
gjeff12
I've never really been bothered by the sounds, but after constantly reading all these complaints on everything since gt6 was announced I've been paying more attention in other games. I noticed GTA v actually has good sounds. The car that looks like the Audi a4 sounds awesome and if those sort of sounds were in gt6.... I'm happy with good graphics and good racing but nice engine sounds would be a bonus.
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That is so true. The point is not that the sounds are so bad that are distracting, like some claim, but that could be better or more realistic. So is common that people than don't follow gaming forums get surprised when they first read about bad sounds when had no problem and never thought about them. For the most part they work well as intended in the gameplay, with lows and highs but with no true protagonism, so is the reason that people less obsessed can tolerate them (or even like) and look more at others features.
 
I can wait if they make just the R18 sound right on the start. Yeah not in the Gamescom/TGS trailer...
 
gjeff12
I've never really been bothered by the sounds, but after constantly reading all these complaints on everything since gt6 was announced I've been paying more attention in other games. I noticed GTA v actually has good sounds. The car that looks like the Audi a4 sounds awesome and if those sort of sounds were in gt6.... I'm happy with good graphics and good racing but nice engine sounds would be a bonus.

P.S. gt5 actually won an award for best sound effects of the year:
http://www.psxextreme.com/feature/665-1.html
(Not really sure how prestigious this is but gt5 still won)
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:nervous: Amongst other PS3 games...
 

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