The Sound Update Thread (The Return)

  • Thread starter TayeezSA
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From what I've heard of the sounds it's much the same as GT5/6, maybe they have done a better job of the sample recordings but they are still using that same sound engine, the same noises are coming out of it, that overly synthetic clean sound that everyone hates.

Dirt Rally have done the most consistent awesome job of sounds lately, every car is orgasmic, even when they used the wrong car sounds (Lancia Delta sounds like a Metro 6R4) because they didn't have the car available to record.

We are sharing a number of engines, simply because when I started at Codies back in 2007 I made the decision to throw away all of our recordings and start again from scratch - what we had simply wasn't good enough. We don't have the budget that the big guys have to acquire vehicles, so sharing is a necessity but as we continue development and get more budget we can record more vehicles. The Delta however isn't sharing the 6R4 recording - they're different engine configurations... but yes we were sharing. At one point in the DiRT history the Stratos and 6R4 were sharing the 6R4 V6 but not any more ;)... We've also recently managed to grab an S4 for future games too, yay!!! :D

That will be the benefit of AES when if finally starts to sound realistic, you won't need to plough so much time and money in to recording vehicles, but at this time... for me... it simply isn't working. Mike is excellent at his job, but I imagine he's banging his head against a brick wall right now in frustration.
 
Sounds pretty much the same to me after watching the Ferrari video. Nothing different than GT5 or 6. I actually noticed how the nice Doppler effect in GT6 was eliminated, which is a major step-down.

There was no major change from GT5P to GT5 despite they mentioned it was still work in progress. GT6 had a slight improvement, but that bland and artificial sound, plus colossal mistakes with some car's samples were still present. Not to mention the futile attempts to patch the sounds, which in some cases it even destroyed cars that sounded slightly okay for reasons that are completely mind-baffling (the Impreza 22b is a prime example, as well as the Saleen S7).

So I wouldn't expect any changes at all.
 
We are sharing a number of engines, simply because when I started at Codies back in 2007 I made the decision to throw away all of our recordings and start again from scratch - what we had simply wasn't good enough. We don't have the budget that the big guys have to acquire vehicles, so sharing is a necessity but as we continue development and get more budget we can record more vehicles. The Delta however isn't sharing the 6R4 recording - they're different engine configurations... but yes we were sharing. At one point in the DiRT history the Stratos and 6R4 were sharing the 6R4 V6 but not any more ;)... We've also recently managed to grab an S4 for future games too, yay!!! :D

That will be the benefit of AES when if finally starts to sound realistic, you won't need to plough so much time and money in to recording vehicles, but at this time... for me... it simply isn't working. Mike is excellent at his job, but I imagine he's banging his head against a brick wall right now in frustration.

You Sir, are among the industry leaders and pioneers in the sound department. I have fond memories of Dirt 3 and remember how the sound grabbed me instantly and made me think: this is more realistic and accurate than anything I've heard in a Forza game.

Keep up the great work and I'm just saving up to get Dirt Rally. You guys are among my top 3 developers when it comes to capturing the soul and character of car sounds. Happy motoring!
 
With today's car and car gaming culture expanding and becoming even more popular,
i find it strange that you guys couldn't acquire a Delta S4 to record.
i admit, it's a rare rally car, but i mean, contact an Delta S4 owner,
an say like:

Hey man, we are making a great game, we want to record your car sound,
want a free game copy?

All in all, you guys are the masters of your own hard work of art!
And with peps from Evolutions studios there ain't no one to stop you.
 
You Sir, are among the industry leaders and pioneers in the sound department. I have fond memories of Dirt 3 and remember how the sound grabbed me instantly and made me think: this is more realistic and accurate than anything I've heard in a Forza game.

Keep up the great work and I'm just saving up to get Dirt Rally. You guys are among my top 3 developers when it comes to capturing the soul and character of car sounds. Happy motoring!

That's lovely to hear. I didn't have much of a role on DiRT Rally to be honest, but I like to think that what I achieved on DiRT 2/3 onwards had a part to play ;) Everything was started again from scratch basically. Recordings, playback tech, personnel etc. etc. I had a lot of fun on those two titles. Since GRID 2, or maybe it was F1 2013 we moved over from an XML based audio system to middleware which has opened up a lot more flexibility for the sound designers. That was a bit of a fight as Codies wanted to use their own tech, but it paid off :)
 
With today's car and car gaming culture expanding and becoming even more popular,
i find it strange that you guys couldn't acquire a Delta S4 to record.
i admit, it's a rare rally car, but i mean, contact an Delta S4 owner,
an say like:

Hey man, we are making a great game, we want to record your car sound,
want a free game copy?

All in all, you guys are the masters of your own hard work of art!
And with peps from Evolutions studios there ain't no one to stop you.

Ha ha, nope not even close ;) Imagine it. "Hi, I'm from Codemasters. We don't have a lot of money like Sony and Microsoft but we'd like to record your ultra rare, ultra expensive car. Not only that but we want to put it on track and put additional stress on the engine by red-lining it several times."

A lot of these cars are mothballed during the winter months, where they work on the mechanics, and are then only used a few times during the year. Also, being based in the UK, there aren't many around. I believe (may be wrong) but the one we ended up with was in Italy.
 
The event that the video I posted above should be a good chance to meet the owner and do recording while the do the hillclimb ? :D The Delta S4 on the video sounds heavenly.
 
The event that the video I posted above should be a good chance to meet the owner and do recording while the do the hillclimb ? :D The Delta S4 on the video sounds heavenly.

Unfortunately, because of what we need out of the recording, we need to use either a runway or a long straight on a circuit. Hillclimb tracks don't work for us at all.
 
Unfortunately, because of what we need out of the recording, we need to use either a runway or a long straight on a circuit. Hillclimb tracks don't work for us at all.

Would it be possible someday that game could do similar sound simulated ( with the source car available for recording ) ? I know sound simulation is very complicated and difficult to do, but looking at the advancement in tech ( computers, audio recording equipment, software like physics engine ), life like sound should not be a dream anymore.
 
That sound improvement demo shows a definite improvement, but still all of the same problems that plagued the old games, I mean as soon as he downshifts it's immediately obvious we're in the same place, it sounds synthetic and clean, it sounds nothing like a powerful car downshifting, transmission doesn't sound like that and an engine isn't that clean when you downshift.

For me at least they need to ditch that sound engine, it's been plaguing them, I'm not really aware of what AES is but I'm guessing it's some dynamic staging system within the engine, but what they lack is simulating the sound differences between on-off throttle and the transmission etc, in GT it sounds like they have a sample and then they pitch it to RPM in a very basic fashion.

I wasn't aware we had Codemasters sound techs around here, feel honoured. Dirt Rally is one of my favourite racing games ever, and the sounds are industry leading, and it's crazy that after all these years Gran Turismo is still so far behind, they are making baby steps when they need to be making a revolution.
 
That sound improvement demo shows a definite improvement, but still all of the same problems that plagued the old games, I mean as soon as he downshifts it's immediately obvious we're in the same place, it sounds synthetic and clean, it sounds nothing like a powerful car downshifting, transmission doesn't sound like that and an engine isn't that clean when you downshift.

For me at least they need to ditch that sound engine, it's been plaguing them, I'm not really aware of what AES is but I'm guessing it's some dynamic staging system within the engine, but what they lack is simulating the sound differences between on-off throttle and the transmission etc, in GT it sounds like they have a sample and then they pitch it to RPM in a very basic fashion.

I wasn't aware we had Codemasters sound techs around here, feel honoured. Dirt Rally is one of my favourite racing games ever, and the sounds are industry leading, and it's crazy that after all these years Gran Turismo is still so far behind, they are making baby steps when they need to be making a revolution.
The gear change sound is to do with transmission physics, not the audio.
 
That's lovely to hear. I didn't have much of a role on DiRT Rally to be honest, but I like to think that what I achieved on DiRT 2/3 onwards had a part to play ;) Everything was started again from scratch basically. Recordings, playback tech, personnel etc. etc. I had a lot of fun on those two titles. Since GRID 2, or maybe it was F1 2013 we moved over from an XML based audio system to middleware which has opened up a lot more flexibility for the sound designers. That was a bit of a fight as Codies wanted to use their own tech, but it paid off :)
Wwise is amazing, isn't it? :D Dunno why Polyphony isn't using Wwise or FMOD too, they're soooo easy to handle with the right audio samples.
 
Would it be possible someday that game could do similar sound simulated ( with the source car available for recording ) ? I know sound simulation is very complicated and difficult to do, but looking at the advancement in tech ( computers, audio recording equipment, software like physics engine ), life like sound should not be a dream anymore.

Well yes, but that's what AES is basically isn't it in a backward sort of way? I don't know a lot about it.

Certainly physical modelling is being used for musical instruments such as piano, guitar, trumpet but there is still a sterile quality about them which I don't think has been nailed just yet. Some of them just plain suck. Violins for example. So it could work for the more basic of engines which have little individual character but as you progress to the more interesting engines, that's where the problem lies.

There's other forms of synthesis that could be looked at. We use granular synthesis ourselves but that of course requires the source recording to our requirements. Wavelet synthesis may be a way to go. Ideally, grab a few samples across the RPM and re-synthesise everything else in between.
 
Wwise is amazing, isn't it? :D Dunno why Polyphony isn't using Wwise or FMOD too, they're soooo easy to handle with the right audio samples.

Yep, we're most definitely Wwise whores :) The only issue I have with it is that you can over-complicate things if you're not careful. We're using our own engine tech though, not REV. The benefits aren't so obvious to DiRT but in games where you have long straights where the engine is in top gear, slowly increasing in RPM, granular synthesis breaks down and doesn't work imo. In fact, I'm doing some work for F1 teams and their simulators, using purely loops as they sound much better on the long straights.
 
Well yes, but that's what AES is basically isn't it in a backward sort of way? I don't know a lot about it.
That's what it's supposed to be, but... you hear the results. A normal, sample based audio system is still the most efficient way. No racing game I know aside from GT is using AES, for a good reason.

Yep, we're most definitely Wwise whores :) The only issue I have with it is that you can over-complicate things if you're not careful. We're using our own engine tech though, not REV. The benefits aren't so obvious to DiRT but in games where you have long straights where the engine is in top gear, slowly increasing in RPM, granular synthesis breaks down and doesn't work imo. In fact, I'm doing some work for F1 teams and their simulators, using purely loops as they sound much better on the long straights.
Yeah, when you stretch the sample over a too big range, the fidelity goes down the drain, but hey, that's physics. :D Having a sample for every 1000 rpm range, looped, with good transitioning works great in FMOD, getting the samples is incredibly difficult though without any access to the cars.
 
So is AES a thrid party middleware? I wondered if it was simply the Roberson system.

It's no so much that, but with granular if you are accelerating much slower than the source recording, the system has to insert repeating samples to make up for it, so it all gets a tad robotic sounding.

As for 'sample every 1000 revs', don't forget that each doubling of the RPM is an octave (doubling) in pitch so 1000-2000 is an octave pitch change, 2000-3000 is half an octave... etc. etc.
 
The Mazda is using samples that have a distinct intake texture to the exhaust note. They've been in service since GT2. At least they're trying to plug the gaps in authenticity, but it is odd that it's still with older assets and techniques.


...

That will be the benefit of AES when if finally starts to sound realistic, you won't need to plough so much time and money in to recording vehicles, but at this time... for me... it simply isn't working. Mike is excellent at his job, but I imagine he's banging his head against a brick wall right now in frustration.

Or is that just what Sony want you to think? :D

Ha ha, nope not even close ;) Imagine it. "Hi, I'm from Codemasters. We don't have a lot of money like Sony and Microsoft but we'd like to record your ultra rare, ultra expensive car. Not only that but we want to put it on track and put additional stress on the engine by red-lining it several times."

...

Just pretend to be Alain de Cadenet... I'm sure nothing could go wrong!

So is AES a thrid party middleware? I wondered if it was simply the Roberson system.

It's no so much that, but with granular if you are accelerating much slower than the source recording, the system has to insert repeating samples to make up for it, so it all gets a tad robotic sounding.

As for 'sample every 1000 revs', don't forget that each doubling of the RPM is an octave (doubling) in pitch so 1000-2000 is an octave pitch change, 2000-3000 is half an octave... etc. etc.

AES is the label we give to the method to distinguish it from sampling, based on a few strings and magic numbers ("illegally") extracted from GT6's encrypted game files by skilled individuals. It appears to be proprietary, and (by ear as much as anything else) similar to a method I came up with independently after being inspired by the example set by Scawen Roberts' approach in LFS.

They are all similar to the Roberson technique (listen here), in terms of how the different engine configuration sounds are extracted from the generation method, but I suspect they all use distinct generation techniques (if only perhaps a couple of different classes of technique, in respect of the nature of engine sounds). PD's generation technique is far more sophisticated than anything I could produce.

The Roberson method stops short of exhaust tract modeling, AES has a rudimentary implementation at present, most of which is turned off, and I have personally tried a complete "waveguide" approach, which has surprising properties even with a basic generation step.


A major problem I found with wavelets, remembering that I only tried to resynthesise existing samples to sound like different engines, as opposed to a more direct synthesis path, is that it doesn't really do interpolation between samples any better. Not unless you can account for the apparently random changes between sampled points ("engine sounds are stochastic"). In which case, other generation methods are more desirable from a computational efficiency standpoint.


I think PD don't use Wwise or FMOD for the same reasons iRacing abandoned FMOD implementation. And what use is it to AES anyway? :)
 
Ha ha, nope not even close ;) Imagine it. "Hi, I'm from Codemasters. We don't have a lot of money like Sony and Microsoft but we'd like to record your ultra rare, ultra expensive car. Not only that but we want to put it on track and put additional stress on the engine by red-lining it several times."

A lot of these cars are mothballed during the winter months, where they work on the mechanics, and are then only used a few times during the year. Also, being based in the UK, there aren't many around. I believe (may be wrong) but the one we ended up with was in Italy.

Yeah i kinda forget what goes into recording a car.
Sorry.
 
Is it just me or Forza has the level of sound fidelity that GT should have had in the PS3 era? I don't exactly why, but I always felt that their sounds were just better in a couple of ways, and that they used the correct samples most of the time. Just that. Even with the incorrect samples GT always sounded more "connected to the car". (you can kill me)
Am I crazy? I'm just asking if I'm the only one.
By the way, having something like Raceroom... That would be something. But even with that, I still find them kind of disconnected from the world of the game...

So, yeah, that.
 
The turbo spooling and blow off/back pressure chatter is a nice addition.
A few of the cars sound improved over past GT's

My rough order of sounds so far-

GT4.....GT5..GT6......GTS.................Other sims.............Reality.


I can't believe after all this time they still haven't got on top of this, it has been almost 20 years of GT and all we can say is 'well a few of the cars sound a bit better, still horrible tyre screeching'.
 
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