I dont know why racing games never have it, but the sound of a car up close and in the distance can be completly different as you can hear with the BRM, grumbly and roaring up close, but smoother and howling in the distance. Obviously it would depend what cars, but the F1 cars would do it, and you should be able to hear the car basically the whole way round the track.
I have only just found this game (only just finished downloading from steam) Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45, but it mentions ... Distance-based sound system dynamically creates the battle ambiance.
I've said it before, but for games that use samples and merge the samples at different rpm, why not have another set of samples (distance sounds) and merge them with the other samples as the distance increases. Is this possible ?
I think some frequences attenuate (is that the right word, I mean lose volume with distance) more than others, hence a BRM on one side of a track sounds different, not just louder, when it screams past you. I'd have thought that frequency dependant attenuation wouldn't be hard to code, although it might be tough to perfect.
When the car is on the other side of the circuit you are hearing not only the sound from the car itself but also the echo of reverberated sound bouncing back at you off all manner of objects in the surrounding area. This gives a really open but still hollow reverb sound that changes as the car changes position around the track.
I'm not aware of any open cockpit racer or motorcycle racer that doesn't use earplugs of some type. I always use foam earplugs and a helmet when driving my motorcycle. The earplugs cut out almost all of the wind noise, and you can hear the engine (and other vehicles). When I had the Caterham, the wind noise was also very loud, and earplugs once again greatly reduced wind noise to the point that if driver and passenger wore earplugs, you could hear a normal conversation. The foam earplugs mostly eliminate high frequency noises.
The in car sounds should reflect what a driver hears, including the effects of earplugs, or earplugs should be a sound option.
When you are sitting in a grandstand watching cars "scream past you" then of course all you are going to hear is engine noise.
When you are outside the car, but following it, then you are going to pick up the wind noise because the "camera" with the microphone attached to it is also fighting through the wind at high speed.
It is very realistic wind noise. Go drive on a freeway at 100mph and stick your head out the window.... now jump in an open wheel F1 car and do it at 220mph and tell me if the wind noise is too loud!
Frequency decay is dependent upon the wavelength of the signal:- the higher the wavelength, the shorter the distance over which it fades to zero, which is why you can always hear Barry's bass bins before what little mid range there is in the crap music he listens to.
It's also the reason why T-Mobile and Orange [1800mhz networks] require twice as many masts for full coverage as O2 and Vodafone [900mhz networks]
This is sort of relevant to this thread... Just thought I'd tell you that the BF1 car sounds amazing, if you turn up the volume in LFS, and control panel (but down on PC speakers so that the sound is distorted).
Must surely depend a lot on the car driven and even its gearing--when I've driven at 200 km/h the engine has always been roaring in the upper-registers of 6th gear. But then I've only driven fast in new sports cars with good insulation.
Here's a speed run (gauge view) in a 2006 Z06 Corvette to 190mph, wind noise is barely noticable. Of course in a real race car, the side windows would be down. This was done on a 3 mile runway, and my guess is that it took over 2 miles to reach 190mph.
Now in this case, a souped up Hayabusa running up to 211mph (speedo shows 220mph), the wind noise does get very loud, but you can still hear the louder engine until the rider backs off the throttle.
With a tank cam video, you really can't appreciate what 180+mph looks like but here's a good example. The camera dislodged from the mount, so the video is short. The rider takes it's easy until he gets past some dirt on the two lane road, but after that, he opens it up and you can see just how quickly the busa gets up to speed:
As I peviously posted, in a real race vehicle, the driver would be wearing ear plugs and a helmet, or helment with headset that cuts out wind noise so the driver can communicate with the pit.
Keep in mind that nearly all of the engine horsepower, aside from some other various friction losses, is being resisted by aerodynamic drag as the car moves through the air. At high speeds the car exerts very high forces against the air and it is quite loud indeed.
I wouldn't call that barely noticeable. You start to hear wind by 2nd/3rd gear, and by 5th wind and other noises almost overpower the engine compared to the same rpms in 4th.
Ok, but it's a lot less noise than the souped up Busa that ran up to 211mph.
Based on my personal experience with foam ear plugs and a helmet, the wind noise (at least the high frequency component) is almost completely eliminated by the ear plugs.
Here's another sample, a BMW M3 GTR running a combined Nurburg Ring and Nordschleife. One warmup lap on the Nurburg, then a race lap and a left onto the Nordschleife. There are 2 fast sections early on, and the final straight. The gears and rear end sounds seem to be the dominating sounds on this car:
Air plugs do work differently, cheaper ones block out way more high frequency noise than they do lower frequencies. Proper ones block all frequencies the same amount (or there about), so you can still hear perfectly clearly, it's just like turning the volume down on the world.
I actually like the loud wind noise, i think it adds to the sensation of speed quite well. It gets a bit excessive in the closed cars though, depending on wich car you sit in, for example normal road cars are quite quiet nowadays inside.
The only thing really bad is when you look at the formula cars from the trackside cameras, you hear only windnoise when they are blasting by, wich is really wrong and sorta weird in lfs.
And what about the "crashing" sound that just breaks your headphones and ears? Probably the most annoying thing in LFS... There are wav files in D:\Live For Speed\data\snd folder and afaik the crashing sound is produced when the tyres touch the ground. I've put the ScrapeHard.wav and ScrapeSoft.wav sounds to 0% volume but I couldn't get rid of the sound.
Funny, I really like those sounds. And because I crash a lot, I get to hear them often! lol
Especially when you tip 90degrees and scrape on down the road- that's my favourite!!!
Of course in a real race car, the side windows would be down.
This is a bizzare habbit only usually found in the US, the rest of the world always keep the windows up, I don't know what gain people expect to get from having the windows down, weight? or (very marginal) safety grounds? Whatever it is surely the aerodynamic penalty cannot be worth it.
As I peviously posted, in a real race vehicle, the driver would be wearing ear plugs
From my experience the majority of club racers do not wear ear plugs.
This is a bizzare habbit only usually found in the US, the rest of the world always keep the windows up, I don't know what gain people expect to get from having the windows down, weight? or (very marginal) safety grounds? Whatever it is surely the aerodynamic penalty cannot be worth it.
I was wondering about this too... It does seem like it would just create drag? Also, in my experience, it is pretty annoying having the windows down going fast - but what do I know? ^.^
I think wind noise blocking out the engine in single seaters is unrealistic. My Dad says that in his car he does get a good amount of wind noise at speed but it never comes close to drowning out the engine noise. Remember this is a 1600 production based engine (CVH) with a racing exhaust, it's not very loud by racing car standards.