Give us better sounds - PLEASE !!

  • Thread starter steamcat
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Care to expand on that smiley?

lol :lol: Did it to get your attention. Carry on the discussion, I won't do it again. :)

It was basically just the $60 budget part, can't believe some people will think that's cheap. XD
 
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Instead of upgrading the graphic even more, I think they should have improved the sound first. The graphic is already extremely good in GT5, but the sounds very, very bad :(
 
I can't believe the means some people are going through to defend or justify the crappy sounds of the GT series. PD recorded the sound for almost every car, they were just doing it wrong. With the same amount of time, they could have recorded proper sounds. The cars were not recorded under load and that is why we are stuck with vacuum cleaner sounds.

If any GT game were a PC title, a small team of modders could have improved half the sounds (some cars are too exclusive to find) in less than a year. Without any expensive resources.

Yeah right, I'm defending PD, me, the one who revived this thread the moment he watched the first gameplay video with the X-bow. I don't know why some people just can't read or don't care to read, I've said that an improvement is a MUST but to think that GT6 is going to be at the level of iRacing or R3E is just wishfull thinking. We want better sounds but you need to be realistic with your expectations.

People act like they won't accept anything inferior to what the top of the line sims are offering, well, prepare for a massive dissapointment.

Cheap? GT5 had a budget of 60 million dollars+. Most developers can only dream of a budget that size.

Not cheap for them, FOR YOU...:banghead:
 
Your post still doesn't make sense because other games that are even cheaper (Namely all standard retail PC sims) sound better. There is no reason I should have to pay more for a game to have better sounds.
 
The iRacing staff are really starting to get things sorted when it comes to sounds.



I wish Kaz would get his head out of his own butt for once and get external help with this but he won't and so we'll probably have to live with the vacuum cleaners for a good while.



Now that is glorious. Just shut your eyes and listen and you would be tricked in believing that it was real...Well it kind of is!!

There is simply no debate. PD have some work to do. Progress has been made over 15 years but we are a long way from where GT should be. I can almost guarantee that come GT7 on PS4, this thread and the other sound threads will be going strong. PD are taking the long way around.

For a man who listens to Jazz, and probably has a vinyl collection to rival any one I am surprised. His house his probably a mess but he folds his underwear and organizes his draws impeccably!
 
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Now that is glorious. Just shut your eyes and listen and you would be tricked in believing that it was real...Well it kind of is!!

There is simply no debate. PD have some work to do. Progress has been made over 15 years but we are a long way from where GT should be. I can almost guarantee that come GT7 on PS4, this thread and the other sound threads will be going strong. PD are taking the long way around.

For a man who listens to Jazz, and probably has a vinyl collection to rival any one I am surprised. His house his probably a mess but he folds his underwear and organizes his draws impeccably!

I love iRacing's sounds and recognise and applaud their achievements (which they only really managed by shunning the established methods), but I think that's a substantial exaggeration, at least for the external sounds.

The internal viewpoint is better, probably because the mix is fixed, but there's some obvious tell-tale sampling foibles still, not least the switching in the timbre as the sample volumes are swapped (to avoid the blending interference causing dullness, samples are sometimes swapped quickly at the extremes of their ranges, but they sort of "pop" instead) and that gear whine sample is distractingly repetitive and sensitive to pitch shifting, despite the sumptuous modulation coming from the driveline modeling.

The obvious response might well be "still a million times better than GT", but that's not the point. Games should be doing more already, today. Some are doing more than others to "catch up", and that is more immediately apparent with some games than others. iRacing is the only game I know of that clearly demonstrates that things need to change in a very fundamental way. What's interesting, for me, is that GT's approach to sound is very similar to iRacing's, except that GT5's samples just don't sound very nice too much of the time (legacy, low memory items).

Not really sure what jazz has to do with any of this; there's no real correlation to engine sounds there. The idea that an appreciation of music is an advantage in the pursuit of understanding engine sounds is surely fallacious (aside from the fact that both demand, but not quite necessitate, the use of your ears).
 
Now that is glorious. Just shut your eyes and listen and you would be tricked in believing that it was real...Well it kind of is!!

First time I saw that video and heard the second car entering the picture I said to myself before it came into view, "that sounds like an F1 car from the 70's"...sure enough...
 
PD needs the Ricks (Rubin, Ocasek). Badly.

I swear this is one of the reasons i stopped playing GT5, i was putting so much time into it and for lack of a better term, the sound in general just pissed me off.

Bravo iRacing tho.
 
iRacing sounds seem like the interior sound used outside - is a bit strange, no environmental feeling at all, close mic'ed
I get a big disconnect from the footage and sound

At least with Race Room Experience, you can hear the stereo image and sound mix change from interior to outside. Nice race brake squealing too....

Project cars, aka Shift 3, has decent sound, better than the previous 2 games, mainly because they aren't distorting everything to hell and back





Nice environmental audio - GT's rally could use some of this...
 
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The sound is truly lacking, some cars more than others but it is a lot better than it was in GT4 so it is not like they haven't did anything about the sound.

Forza on the other hand makes a pretty good noise and in most cases is more enjoyable from a sound perspective but the sounds aren't that realistic there either. Lots of cars sound like they have a bigger stronger engine than what is actually in them and they sound the same from the front, hood, cockpit, rear where in GT at least they did give us a different sound out the rear than in the front.

The thing about the sound that bothered me the most was the gear whine of the race tranny.
 
iRacing sounds seem like the interior sound used outside - is a bit strange, no environmental feeling at all, close mic'ed
I get a big disconnect from the footage and sound

The things iRacing lacks is doppler effect and echo really. If it had that it would probably have the best sounds of all games.

It still sounds fantastic even without though.
 
I love iRacing's sounds and recognise and applaud their achievements (which they only really managed by shunning the established methods), but I think that's a substantial exaggeration, at least for the external sounds.

The internal viewpoint is better, probably because the mix is fixed, but there's some obvious tell-tale sampling foibles still, not least the switching in the timbre as the sample volumes are swapped (to avoid the blending interference causing dullness, samples are sometimes swapped quickly at the extremes of their ranges, but they sort of "pop" instead) and that gear whine sample is distractingly repetitive and sensitive to pitch shifting, despite the sumptuous modulation coming from the driveline modeling.

The obvious response might well be "still a million times better than GT", but that's not the point. Games should be doing more already, today. Some are doing more than others to "catch up", and that is more immediately apparent with some games than others. iRacing is the only game I know of that clearly demonstrates that things need to change in a very fundamental way. What's interesting, for me, is that GT's approach to sound is very similar to iRacing's, except that GT5's samples just don't sound very nice too much of the time (legacy, low memory items).

Not really sure what jazz has to do with any of this; there's no real correlation to engine sounds there. The idea that an appreciation of music is an advantage in the pursuit of understanding engine sounds is surely fallacious (aside from the fact that both demand, but not quite necessitate, the use of your ears).


I-Racing is not perfect, that was a good example though, and as you pointed out it had issues of its own. Tech issues aside, what is fantastic about it is that it makes me want to drive the car when the sound is as close as that example. PD will get there eventually, but they are slow. You're correct in saying that overall the Sim racing genre should be way ahead of where they are now.

The Jazz has nothing to do with it, but normally I suppose those that listen to Jazz appreciate the depth and detail and technical mastery of the music. Jazz folk normally really enjoy sound so I guess It surprises that GT sound are not more accomplished seeing that Kaz is a jazz man.
 
I think GT5 has the best doppler effect than any sim/game out there. Just imagine GT6 with good car sound and louder base on those V8 cars, it'll be ridiculous. :)



Edit: Nevermind, I think the one CoolColJ posted was better, but just my opinion on doppler effect. :)
 
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Fantastic ≠ Realistic

Even so, the C63 sound in GT5 is hardly fantastic at all in my opinion.

It sounds actually really bad, especially from the cockpit view. The exhaust in low RPM sounds decent, but thats it. :indiff:
 
I-Racing is not perfect, that was a good example though, and as you pointed out it had issues of its own. Tech issues aside, what is fantastic about it is that it makes me want to drive the car when the sound is as close as that example. PD will get there eventually, but they are slow. You're correct in saying that overall the Sim racing genre should be way ahead of where they are now.

The Jazz has nothing to do with it, but normally I suppose those that listen to Jazz appreciate the depth and detail and technical mastery of the music. Jazz folk normally really enjoy sound so I guess It surprises that GT sound are not more accomplished seeing that Kaz is a jazz man.

It's really not that PD are slow; they have made great strides with every game. The one thing that has stayed static is the one thing that most people can't listen "through" - the samples. This is almost certainly a memory budget issue (damn graphics stealing the show again).

I happen to have read a little bit about ear training recently, and I can tell you (according to the / a current philosophical and psychological viewpoint) that there is a wealth of "depth and detail" in engine sounds that are simply not apparent without training (not that petrolheads call it that), much as it is in music, but they are separate concepts (music and engines), so they need separate attention. This probably sounds elitist, or something, but it's also true of other things - being a good photographer doesn't automatically make you a good painter. Both are visual media, and, as an example, the composition aspect is shared, but you still have to know how to use a brush and colour etc. (or maybe not, if you're going punk).

But that's irrelevant, because GT's sound is an accomplishment; the lightweight samples (and those that are poorly attributed) mask most of the effect of that accomplishment for those who don't know what they're listening to. I'm not saying that's not a problem (for a start, I wouldn't feel the need to "waste" my time with these posts if most people could hear the potential), but these misconceptions just need to stop.

I agree about sound being an important factor for the enjoyment of driving, and that GT is lacking in that area (honestly I was disappointed with the same-old samples in GT5 - it's funny because they worked really well with GT2's extreme sound mix, but GT3's focus on realism instead already caused problems.)
 
But that's irrelevant, because GT's sound is an accomplishment;

In what way? Serious question, because I suspect I know where you're going with this. Ignoring the unsuitability of the samples, the sound itself is treated very well in GT5.

I'd think of it as someone playing chopsticks badly on the world's best piano: yeah, the song is bad but the quality of the noise is excellent.
 
In what way? Serious question, because I suspect I know where you're going with this. Ignoring the unsuitability of the samples, the sound itself is treated very well in GT5.

I'd think of it as someone playing chopsticks badly on the world's best piano: yeah, the song is bad but the quality of the noise is excellent.

There isn't really a handy musical analogy. At least not one that I can come up with, at any rate. If anything, your analogy should be reversed, as it is, in general, the way the sound is controlled in GT5 that is high quality, but the sound that is being controlled (samples) is not. Imagine Lang Lang (as a mildly topical example) playing a modern multi-sampled electric piano, filled with samples from a 1980s CASIO keyboard with AM piano samples, and maybe we're close in feel, if not technically.

For starters, though, there isn't a single other racing game that correctly reproduces transmission delay. The fact that sound waves have a finite speed introduces noticeable delays within one hundred metres - about 35 metres if you have a sharp visual cue to compare the sound to, assuming the "usual" 100 millisecond temporal resolution of hearing, in terms of perception of separate events.

Then there's the sampling engine itself. Whilst it still relies on pitch scaling, rather than time stretching as with the highest quality samplers (although that's far from universal), the control input that determines the pitch to play the samples back at, is updated very frequently. This helps with the fly-bys, throttle blips and otherwise makes the sound very crisp. A slow update rate introduces extra harmonics that can sound interesting, but they're not there on the real car, so shouldn't be there in a realistic sound - plus, for very slow rates, typically around 30 Hz or lower, the sound has obvious stepping. Bearing in mind that most games have the sound engine tied into the framerate, and that most games have a 30Hz framerate, you can see that this stepping must be pervasive, which it is, but it also means people are used to it...

They have a large dynamic range in the sound mix, although the transfer from that high dynamic range internal mix to the external outputs is lacking with GT5's implementation.
Rather than try to hand-mix the sound, they rely on actual physical characteristics of sound propagation. This, though, has caused upset in that cars which are far louder than your own will drown yours out. There's a few things you can do to fix that, but none of them involve removing the base dynamic range, which is really something special on the right hardware and in the right environment - more games should allow that as an option.

GT itself should offer more dynamic range options, along the lines of typical HDR lighting implementations ("window" the sound to fit a given dynamic range into your chosen output dynamic range to suit the listening environment), plus the ability to select your output dynamic range (display device dynamic range is more or less fixed, but speakers vary wildly, so we need options there.)
That first step PD have taken is infinitely better than the static mix you get in most games, and I hope they expand on it.

The overall approach is one of looking at the sound from a physical perspective, that's why there are multiple, separate directional sound sources per car, rather than just one for the engine, one for the tyres (GT has used a separate channel for each tyre since GT3) and one for the drivetrain. In the vast majority of cases, these separate sources are sampled independently, but are still collapsed into a single source for localising in the game's soundscape - GT keeps them as separate sources and mixes them as such for a richer and more spatially varying sound. Then there's all the little incidental effects, one being the exhaust flow-noise filter thingy, which adds a nice spatial effect depending on listening angle.
It wouldn't surprise me if PD added more of this sort of thing with the samples staying the same, because they supposedly have a bit of headroom for processing on the SPEs, but I guess the RAM is still maxed out (so no new samples). What's great is that higher-quality samples will plug into this system with no real penalty other than a higher memory usage, and then things will get interesting.
 
I had put my idea in a news feed, I'll put it here as well. I find, not the engine sound, but the exhaust sound lacking. I have noticed for years that it is being drowned out by the engine & transmission noise. Perhaps if there was a sub-menu in the sound menu to raise or lower the sound/tone of the exhaust, engine, transmission, all individually then maybe us users could find that balance in sound that we have been looking for for 15 years.
 
A bit distorted, but not bad, better than GT5's and Race Room Experience's Zonda R - could use more environmental processing however - still feels disconnected from the footage



I notice Project Cars uses low pass filtering on the distant sounds, but could use more of it and again, more evironmental processing. Looping in the sample is bad however...
I like these static spectator/replay cams
 
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i still remember the first time i heard the sound of the 350z in need for speed underground 2.... and i dont think gran turismo 5 even beat that, its fine when you have got the physics but that true car sound is what gets the heart pumping when you put that foot down and to ths day gt5 dosnt have that, take forza for eg.. ok the sounds are better but they all have a samey feel between cars so i do hope they fix this but im not holding my breath until the next gen gt.
 
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