Give us better sounds - PLEASE !!

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HuskyGT
More cars that sound incorrect:

- Oldsmobile Toronado. (sounds like a fake V6-ish weird sound)

- Corvette Z06 RM. (same as the Toronado)

- Viper Oreca. (Sounds like a V8. I'm surprised that they fixed the Viper GTSR Concept, but not these two racing Vipers and the old Dodge Viper GTS)

Seriously. The person who is in charge to assign the samples to each car should be fired and not let near a programing job ever again. Hundreds of us here could do a much better job.

This game is getting really tiring... I don't want to admit it, but it's getting harder to find a reason to play. The only reason I play it is to enjoy the few cars that are right, and in hope that someday there will be an update that makes the game better. Sounds are a BIG deal for me. They can also be a deal breaker.
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Implying that it is a programming job? Remember, though, that these aren't the sounds PD really want us to hear. They will be coming in the future, and it's more concrete now than it was when the promise was made, because we've had a sneak preview. ;)

It's really damned annoying that they leave the job of allocating the legacy samples (basically data entry) to someone who clearly knows little-to-nothing about what sounds like what, but that does at least mean all those who do know a thing or two are actually working on what matters - their long-overdue improvements.

Sit tight, news is surely imminent for the January update - it may be the news we've been waiting for. On the other hand, we may have to wait a little longer. It's coming, though.


My theory is that the new sounds and the course creator will come at the same time, because both need significant changes to the code balance which would imply they are interdependent in terms of SPU scheduling.

The sound requires more layers, a new synthesis scheme for each layer and some way of dynamically swapping sources and scaling the detail of the sound generation (only so much in the way of resources there, and it's a really tricky issue that will become ever more relevant moving forwards - no time like the present).

The course creator, in my opinion, is awaiting some clever dynamic, scene-based occlusion culling and LoD scaling. Currently it's "baked" per track, controlled according to the car's position on the track, but not its orientation (standard practice for closed-course racing games). That's why the reverse variations of the Matterhorn tracks, for instance, don't have the missing geometry you get when you "look behind" on the forward versions, in certain locations. In the situation where you can go anywhere, look in any direction (Ronda!), that "best guessing" for what geometry to "remove" from the scene isn't good enough - it needs to be more robust.

Both of these systems imply a processing overhead, so they need to be carefully integrated with all the other loads in the game, and that's why I think the one is dependent on the other - I wouldn't be surprised if the AI gets an update at the same time, either.
 
Griffith500
Implying that it is a programming job? Remember, though, that these aren't the sounds PD really want us to hear. They will be coming in the future, and it's more concrete now than it was when the promise was made, because we've had a sneak preview. ;)

It's really damned annoying that they leave the job of allocating the legacy samples (basically data entry) to someone who clearly knows little-to-nothing about what sounds like what, but that does at least mean all those who do know a thing or two are actually working on what matters - their long-overdue improvements.

Sit tight, news is surely imminent for the January update - it may be the news we've been waiting for. On the other hand, we may have to wait a little longer. It's coming, though.


My theory is that the new sounds and the course creator will come at the same time, because both need significant changes to the code balance which would imply they are interdependent in terms of SPU scheduling.

The sound requires more layers, a new synthesis scheme for each layer and some way of dynamically swapping sources and scaling the detail of the sound generation (only so much in the way of resources there, and it's a really tricky issue that will become ever more relevant moving forwards - no time like the present).

The course creator, in my opinion, is awaiting some clever dynamic, scene-based occlusion culling and LoD scaling. Currently it's "baked" per track, controlled according to the car's position on the track, but not its orientation (standard practice for closed-course racing games). That's why the reverse variations of the Matterhorn tracks, for instance, don't have the missing geometry you get when you "look behind" on the forward versions, in certain locations. In the situation where you can go anywhere, look in any direction (Ronda!), that "best guessing" for what geometry to "remove" from the scene isn't good enough - it needs to be more robust.

Both of these systems imply a processing overhead, so they need to be carefully integrated with all the other loads in the game, and that's why I think the one is dependent on the other - I wouldn't be surprised if the AI gets an update at the same time, either.
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What makes me feel optimistic is that the game doesn't even have a month out. There are a lot of future updates, and hopefully one of those will be the sound improvements. Sounds are about the most important thing for me next to the physics, but I know there are other things to sort out. First, being the tire width glitch and the constant crashes that a lot of people suffer from.
 
@R35-Vspec
The easiest way, I found (in terms of computation), was to use amplitude modulation - several sinusoids, multiplied together. I actually once worked out, from a harmonics perspective, what the exact modulation frequencies and "amounts" needed to be for a V8, but I cannot for the life of me remember or figure out how I did it (one of my late-night "in-the-zone" / mania sessions!)

Subtractive synth would then come close, but you have to keep reshaping the filters through the rev range to select the right harmonics, instead of just generating the right ones in the first place. I have an "engine configuration morphing" widget-thing that uses a combination of the subtractive and additive synthesis principles to modify samples in real time, but haven't really developed it since it has the same shaping issues as a pure subtractive method, to get around that efficiently, you may as well go full additive...

Nice old-school, Stunt Car Racer vibe in any case. ;)👍

The best way, is not to use "classical" synth methods at all, instead something a bit more modern, and preferably with a physical basis. Additive could be promising, though, depending on how you generate the coefficients.


On a semi-related note, I experienced my first entertaining sound glitch today. Watching a replay where I stalled a few times, the car's engine sound went silent after one such event (but tyres etc. were all still audible). After a subsequent stall, the sounds went crazy - super-high-revving with odd recurring patterns underneath it (like a modulation of some sort, but it's probably just aliasing). Most entertaining.

It reset itself after the replay finished, but it was definitely strange. GT5 was fine with stalls, except for the odd "pop" that did funky things to the reverb, (similar to what happens with impact sounds sometimes), so I wonder what's causing this particular issue in GT6.
 
Griffith500
The sound requires more layers, a new synthesis scheme for each layer and some way of dynamically swapping sources and scaling the detail of the sound generation (only so much in the way of resources there, and it's a really tricky issue that will become ever more relevant moving forwards - no time like the present).
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I'm beginning to doubt anything major can be done in the sound department. Something, sure, there are examples like the Red Bull X Jr and Base Model Super GT cars that sound meaty. But I suspect the quantum shift in sound quality will have to wait for GT7 on PS4. The reason being that GT6 is really pushing PS3 hard, and seems to be squeezed in pretty tight. In fact, some of us suspect from the work done on GT6 being used for GT7 is evidence that they originally intended it to be a PS4 title.

Anyway, the reason I doubt is because of how poorly GT6 is performing in certain areas. For instance, shadows cast by trackside objects like trees are particularly bad, and shadows are texture maps which require ram. And there are more slowdowns in replays which were actually pretty rare in GT5. It seems that GT6 has gobbled up a lot of the headroom remaining from the GT5 engine, and there wasn't that much left.

More robust engine sounds, especially more lifelike sounds with those layers you mentioned, essential layers to be sure, require more ram, and I'm not sure there is any available. Now they could do like that other developer did on that other game on that similar system and shortsheet the sounds for the "non-focus" cars the camera is on. But personally I think that's a bad choice. Resynthesis as you've fussed with requires processor resources, and a certain amount of ram to work with too. Maybe Yamaha has an efficient solution boiled down from their work in their Motif synthesizers. We can hope, as they also do some PC soundcard work.

I know I'm one of the outcasts around here who think the sounds are okay, and a little more grunt would tickle my pleasure center. I'm not sure if we'll get much more than that, or if it will satisfy the grumpers here. Having the right engine samples as Husky and you among others have pointed out would help some, but I'm just not sure how much room is left in the PS3 cup for any trickle down from PS4 work. As I always say, with all things PD, we'll see. :D
 
Tenacious D
I'm beginning to doubt anything major can be done in the sound department. Something, sure, there are examples like the Red Bull X Jr and Base Model Super GT cars that sound meaty. But I suspect the quantum shift in sound quality will have to wait for GT7 on PS4. The reason being that GT6 is really pushing PS3 hard, and seems to be squeezed in pretty tight. In fact, some of us suspect from the work done on GT6 being used for GT7 is evidence that they originally intended it to be a PS4 title.

Anyway, the reason I doubt is because of how poorly GT6 is performing in certain areas. For instance, shadows cast by trackside objects like trees are particularly bad, and shadows are texture maps which require ram. And there are more slowdowns in replays which were actually pretty rare in GT5. It seems that GT6 has gobbled up a lot of the headroom remaining from the GT5 engine, and there wasn't that much left.

More robust engine sounds, especially more lifelike sounds with those layers you mentioned, essential layers to be sure, require more ram, and I'm not sure there is any available. Now they could do like that other developer did on that other game on that similar system and shortsheet the sounds for the "non-focus" cars the camera is on. But personally I think that's a bad choice. Resynthesis as you've fussed with requires processor resources, and a certain amount of ram to work with too. Maybe Yamaha has an efficient solution boiled down from their work in their Motif synthesizers. We can hope, as they also do some PC soundcard work.

I know I'm one of the outcasts around here who think the sounds are okay, and a little more grunt would tickle my pleasure center. I'm not sure if we'll get much more than that, or if it will satisfy the grumpers here. Having the right engine samples as Husky and you among others have pointed out would help some, but I'm just not sure how much room is left in the PS3 cup for any trickle down from PS4 work. As I always say, with all things PD, we'll see. :D
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Exactly, if they stick with the current samples, they will need more RAM. But the X-cars don't sound like they're using a traditional sampling scheme at all. It's something I mentioned a long time ago (back in the Prologue days) that if they were to circumvent the RAM issue, they'd need to exchange it for computational performance, especially bandwidth-wise. That means using a different synthesis technique, which is not easy to do in the first place.

The psycho-acoustically driven selection of a limited number of sources (or specific frequency bands of those sources) from the full set is adequate, as long as you properly determine which sounds are masked at a representative level (dependent on listening environment, i.e. dynamic range). Doing so can release bandwidth and computational power again, meaning you're using less RAM and no more computation than with sampling. Win-win (after some serious research, of course).

What's going to work is a direct synthesis technique with some nifty processing on top of it, that way you have direct control of spectral content (for the masking) and lots of nice flexible sounds for tuning (believable racing exhausts!).

Yamaha is indeed a great source of inspiration, and to think about what might be possible today based purely on their first foray into physical modeling (i.e. the VL1 in 1994) is pretty encouraging. I was not myself expecting to hear what I thought PD would do ("completely new synthesis scheme") until the PS4, either, but I'm 90% certain I've heard it already in the X-cars - albeit incomplete, and tuned way out of the range it should be used in, to compensate for that incompleteness.

We'll wait and see, as you say. :)
 
Griff, you may well be right. It's possible that the reason some of the rest of the game is suffering, like the shadows, is because the team has reserved some space and Cell resources for the sound enhancements. But it depends. That physics build is pretty darn good, and likely uses up some resources. Increasing the resolution, which was the last thing I'd expect them to do, can't be helping, as the Cell has to help out RSX to deliver better graphics than it has a right to display. And there are things I have no clue which are going on under the hood.

It might interest those who are in the hard "sounds must be better" camp that I'm kind of antsy to see if the team can pull off this epic trick on PS3, because I really do like what SIMBIN - or whoever the developer is - has done in Race Room. Yamaha's pioneering work with the VL synths required some potent DSP technology to produce a tiny number of notes, though today I'd think the horsepower of today's processors should be up to the challenge of massaging a few harmonics to get desired results. After all, an engine tone would be one long note, and PD could concentrate their work on "the focus car" for that like those other guys did.

Whatever PD ends up doing, I should be satisfied with the outcome on GT6, and in GT7, I expect some very good things to happen. ;)
 
If it really is that technically limited on PS3, then just give us a better mix!

There are clear and complex sounds from different driving positions, so just give us a better mix of those(the outside view exhaust sounds are great), mix more of those into the In car and Bumper view.

And finally, I don't care what anyone else says, I shouldn't be able to hear full racing slicks squealing when I change direction at full noise... or ever really, short of locking up or spinning out.
 
dening80
If it really is that technically limited on PS3, then just give us a better mix!

There are clear and complex sounds from different driving positions, so just give us a better mix of those(the outside view exhaust sounds are great), mix more of those into the In car and Bumper view.

And finally, I don't care what anyone else says, I shouldn't be able to hear full racing slicks squealing when I change direction at full noise... or ever really, short of locking up or spinning out.
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The in-car views have plenty of exhaust sound usually, especially if it's not stock. Are you sure you've not got the game set to output multi-channel sound but only have stereo speakers, say?

The ordinary stereo mix has a decent balance of "engine" and exhaust sound, and the surround mix is much better again.
The high volume applied to tyres is so you can hear the transitions in grip. I think it's a bit loud, personally; it seems to have been tuned for low-dynamic-range output. A "tyre volume boost" option / slider would be useful here.
 
Serious question here. How much resources would it use up for PD to allow us sliders on the various sounds like engine, wind, tranny, tire noise etc. along with being able to toggle which engine sound source we'd like to use regardless of our view choice. In other words if I want 3rd person sound source using hood or bumper view that would be possible.
 
The sounds problem its barely memory related. You have heard the red bull sound haven't you? That is proof its not a memory issue, Its just a "PD needs more employees in that department" issue.

Edit: It is sort of related, but you don't need big memory sticks to run quality sound samples imo.
And that red bull sound is accurate to what the car may sound in real life, it sounds very similar to the v6 engines that you will hear in f1 next year and that is where they probably where they recorded it from and have edited it to make it sound different.
 
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I found out that "advanced theater" reduces a lot of bass in engine and gameplay sounds.
I have studio monitors and the game sounds are way better with "small theater" mode. With the advanced theater when the cars reach the higher RPMs there is no bass at all and this is silly.
Also I can hear the cars surrounding me 3 times louder than my car. Not really the best audio option for 2-channel stereo users, from what I hear...
I think that advanced theater is optimized for 5.1 or 7.1 systems mode, with separated subwoofer low frequencies.
 
@Johnnypenso theoretically, it doesn't take any "resources", per se, to have such options. It's a bit confusing, though, because the sounds are mixed according to the source and listener locations, so you'd have to separate the locations of the "player" for sound and graphics, which is unusual but not insurmountable (great place for bugs to germinate, though).

I'd wait and see what the mix is like with the new sounds. If they include new layers, the mix will have to be different, and there's a chance that change will bring more options, but it shouldn't be necessary (except for tyres).

@Paolosev91 check that you're only getting a stereo mix from the game.

starknight97
The sounds problem its barely memory related. You have heard the red bull sound haven't you? That is proof its not a memory issue, Its just a "PD needs more employees in that department" issue.

Edit: It is sort of related, but you don't need big memory sticks to run quality sound samples imo.
And that red bull sound is accurate to what the car may sound in real life, it sounds very similar to the v6 engines that you will hear in f1 next year and that is where they probably where they recorded it from and have edited it to make it sound different.
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The X-cars are using (part of) the new synthesis scheme; thus, in fact, proving that RAM is an issue (because the scheme they're using, if my ears are correct, uses less RAM per source than traditional sampling). ;)

I don't think the X-cars are using raw recordings at all, although they will have used them to help tune the sounds, or possibly heavily processed them into a form no longer recognisable as traditional "samples" to use as a precursor in the resynthesis step.
 
starknight97
I know ram is an issue, its just that even with the ram they have they can still make the sound samples much better such as using the new synthesis scheme as you described.
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No, the new synthesis scheme doesn't use samples, at least not in the usual sense (conjecture), because there isn't enough RAM left over (after everything else the game is doing, shadows especially included) to improve them in the normal way (i.e. use more of them and / or make them all longer).

The mis-allocation of samples is a separate issue, but rectifying it would be an improvement to most people's ears, I'm sure.
 
High On Speed
Seriously how come every car has this MASSIVE hissssssssssssssssssssssss......
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Assuming that it's the same as GT5, I found that 8khz was almost exclusively the culprit. Once that frequency was notched out significantly, with surrounding frequencies boosted to compensate, I found quite a different animal.
 
I might not understand any of that technological stuff, how the PS3 uses memory and how its being pushed to the max by GT6 or why I failed my chemistry test last week, but I'm trying to look at this in this perspective.

If anything, why can't PD just put in a massive patch, say a 5gb (i know, battlefield 3 and 4 size) one and patch is so it ignores the sound sampling from the disc. That way the PS3 is using the resources from the patch instead of the disc. I mean the RedBull sounds were patched into the game, so they could do the same with this one. Just patch over the issues sounds. I mean can't they just allocate the processing power to a new set of resources instead of spreading it thin? Like building a house of wood with 10 workers, instead of splitting it 5 to 5 on building another house of bricks, just send all 10 to the house of bricks.

IDK, tech geniuses might be laughing reading this, but thats the way I see it.
 
@andy0a An update should force the game not to load the old sounds to memory if that's what you are saying? It should if PD don't bug things and release the update without proper testing like they always do...
 
Griffith500
On a semi-related note, I experienced my first entertaining sound glitch today. Watching a replay where I stalled a few times, the car's engine sound went silent after one such event (but tyres etc. were all still audible). After a subsequent stall, the sounds went crazy - super-high-revving with odd recurring patterns underneath it (like a modulation of some sort, but it's probably just aliasing). Most entertaining.
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I had a similar thing happen to me yesterday, sounded almost like a broken/detuned analog synth. On another note, some sounds just disappear/reappear after certain events, like the gear whine, which is sometimes there and sometimes not. Switching views usually brings it back, or sometimes it just comes back after a while.

As for the synthesis scheme: I would imagine that if they go for a full blown physical/subtractive/additive sound generation algorithm (basically creating a multitimbral, polyphonic VM/VA synth), this is going to free up RAM (since no or very small pre-baked samples), but you'll be trading it for (a LOT of) processing power (let's say 16 cars, multiple layers per car, 5.1 channels to render with extremely low latency, so very small buffers). Unsure how they would manage that on the PS3, surely they would have to drop some other features. PS4 is a different matter though. :D

Which brings to me another thing I was thinking about: I don't think new/improved sounds will be applied to all 1200+ cars in GT6. Just look at the whole premium/standard car thing. I just don't think they're going to invest the massive amounts of time needed to convert all cars to 'premium' sound. I think it will be limited to a (subset of) the newer cars.

Oh, and '66 GT40 MkI sounds quite awesome! 👍
 
AS I said in the YT comments, thank you for wasting 45 seconds of my life. :P

dening80
And finally, I don't care what anyone else says, I shouldn't be able to hear full racing slicks squealing when I change direction at full noise... or ever really, short of locking up or spinning out.
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Then you might as well be racing with sound off, because you won't be able to ride the grip envelope very well. We aren't in a physical car, so tire squeal is an essential aspect of knowing how well a car is doing around a turn. I do agree though that it could be toned down a bit until that slipping point is being approached. Or maybe I'm just too aggressive with my driving. ;)

Edit: I take it back. The "tires are too loud too long" remark that is. In just about every car I've had Racing tires on, and having just completed a hair-puller of a time trial for the GTP Registry, I needed every squeal. Maybe we should shift that debate to the Comforts.

TorqueHappenS08
The prototype redbull is literally the only car that gives me hope, for realistic sounds.
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Honestly, and I know most in this thread hate me for saying this, but I race with roof cam and the sounds on most of the cars are very good to me. The Mk III Supra with its stock muffler doesn't sound like a jet fighter in real life. It sounds like a little school bus, and whrrs and whines. It could use more grunt at the top of the rpm band but for the most part it's fine. It was my car for well over a decade, and a relative owned two, so I know what one sounds like. And the same goes for a number of sports cars and compacts. This isn't to say that I don't want sound improvements, because I'm quite familiar with this thread and its YT examples, but I really think some of the complaints are way off base.
 
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