Yesterday I was viewing my own hotlap and I noticed that the volume of a car driving by is not very realistic in my opinion. In real life on a trackday, you hear the car coming to you quite like it is in LFS, but when it passes you and is driving away with the exhaust pointed toward you, hell, it hurts your ears... even when it's 100 meters away.
So I think the sound a car that drives away from the spectator is muted to much to soon...

The F1 should hurt your ears, and this can be achieved by turning your speakers up. The other cars wouldn't be that loud at all.

Quote from tristancliffe :

The F1 should hurt your ears, and this can be achieved by turning your speakers up. The other cars wouldn't be that loud at all.

umm.... maybe the road cars wouldn't, but every other one would, the only ones that wouldn't hurt your ears are XFG, XRG, UF1, LX4/LX6, FZ5, RAC, and the tbo class...

the dynamic range of audio in games are all bad. the problem is more pronounced in racing games. i doubt lfs is gonna be the game to push innovation of audio in that direction.

Quote from SidiousX :

umm.... maybe the road cars wouldn't, but every other one would, the only ones that wouldn't hurt your ears are XFG, XRG, UF1, LX4/LX6, FZ5, RAC, and the tbo class...

What? The FO8 might be a bit louder, but nowhere near 'ears hurting' levels. The other single seaters have silencers and would have to comply with noise limits - they are barely audible 100m away.
The GTR cars again wouldn't be loud enough to hurt 100m away, although they would be louder than the road cars.

Even the F1 car at 100m would only just be becoming uncomfortable.

Either you (and the OP) have never ever been to a car race meeting (let alone one with GT cars or F1), or you have a very very low pain/discomfort threshold.

And if it isn't loud enough, turn your speakers up.

I've bin to a F1 race 3 times now and 1 time in Maranello where Ferrari was testing a F1 at that time. You can feel the gearshifts hitting your chest, let alone the exhaust noise. You could hear the F1 screaming everywhere in Maranello (nobody complaining about noise there ) If that doesn't hurt your ears, then there's something wrong with yours.

The problem I ment, is a dynamic problem. To solve that you should include the angle of the passing car in your engine volume algorithm.

I agree with you. nKpro is good about that, you can hear other cars all around the track, seems more realistic.
@ Francorchamps (i live near the track), you can hear cars racing from far away, so why not in LFS?
+1

More important than distance-falloff would be a difference in sound from the front to the back. From the front, most of the sound is whirring of the gearbox (at least on tin-tops) and from behind, most of the sound is from the exhaust, and both sound very different.

Quote from tristancliffe :

What? The FO8 might be a bit louder, but nowhere near 'ears hurting' levels. The other single seaters have silencers and would have to comply with noise limits - they are barely audible 100m away.
The GTR cars again wouldn't be loud enough to hurt 100m away, although they would be louder than the road cars.

Even the F1 car at 100m would only just be becoming uncomfortable.

Either you (and the OP) have never ever been to a car race meeting (let alone one with GT cars or F1), or you have a very very low pain/discomfort threshold.

And if it isn't loud enough, turn your speakers up.

Have you ever been to a GT race? They are loud as a motherf**ker! I've been to an IRL race too, and they make your ears bleed. And I wasn't aware that there is a strict noise making rule for the formula cars in LFS...

Quote from tristancliffe :

And if it isn't loud enough, turn your speakers up.

We aren't talking about them being not loud enough, we're talking about not being able to hear them from a distance, they are plenty loud while you're driving, that's not the problem.

Quote from lalathegreat :

the dynamic range of audio in games are all bad. the problem is more pronounced in racing games. i doubt lfs is gonna be the game to push innovation of audio in that direction.

It's a bit unfortunate, but in gaming environment you have to make some compromises. Some people play this with cheap speakers and people live in apartments where there are people next door, etc. If the dynamic range between slow road cars and the race cars would be realistic some people wouldn't be able to hear the road cars because they would be so quiet and their speakers wouldnt have enough volume.
And if you would have your volume to XRG levels a BF1 driving nearby would blow your ears out. Or worse yet, some background app might give out a bleep or something and your ears would be blown out again.

Having real dynamic rations would be neat, but quite impractical.

I watch touring and formula racing almost every month for years in local race tracks, like Tarumã, Velopark and Guaporé. And yes, it's possible to hear a car getting out of the pit-lane from a kilometer away.

When they're coming, a slightly low, but constant, thin engine and gearbox sound, thanks to Doppler effect. When they pass, the loudest point, with ear hurting and all that stuff (depends on the exhaust position too). When they're going there's thicker sound, with perceptive reverberation from the ambient.

It's just music.

For LFS, a question of better dynamic sound emission. Some small fixes, I think, would greatly increase the sound experience.

Speculating here, and certainly not criticising, but i think LFS mostly uses a simple pitch effect to simulate the engine noise and doppler in relation to your position. There's some spacial effects in there as well for variety, but the car sounds are simplified to a fair degree for file-size reasons or whatever.

OK, now imagine a car revving at 5500rpm on a turntable in front of you, with no reflecting surfaces around (no echos) - as that car rotates on the turntable it's sound changes from a relatively muffled engine noise, to a cracking, ear-splitting noise at the point where the exhaust points directly at you. Pops and snaps that you hear from the back which are less audible at the front or sides.
It's almost two completely different noises.

As a suggested solution, reprogramme the car sounds to be multi-track, basing the track playing on the rotational coordinates of the car in relation to the viewer.
Cars driving toward the viewer would sound as they do now with LFS's current sounds, but as they pass the viewer the bang-track kicks in and blows away their eardrums. Of course, you would hear echos and reflected sound from the rear audio as well while the car comes toward you, but that could get tricky, because that depends on the object/environment the car is driving past; your immediate environment; other objects in the intervening and surrounding space; this could go on a while...

I'm babbling.

Quote from Shirtkicker :

Speculating here, and certainly not criticising, but i think LFS mostly uses a simple pitch effect to simulate the engine noise and doppler in relation to your position. There's some spacial effects in there as well for variety, but the car sounds are simplified to a fair degree for file-size reasons or whatever.

LFS actually simulates all its sound. The only sample used is a single 'pop!' of a single cylinder firing - everything else is calculated on the fly using the specifications of the engine, exhaust, etc. Doppler effect is created simply by the pops being closer together or further apart depending on the direction the car is moving. It's an impressive technique to implement, but needs a lot of work.