CSR uses the same engine note information that the orthodox sounds use. And the whole point of CSR to me seems to be about replacing 'the can of bees' sound with a more realistic sound. Can of bees, whistle, power drill, big fart or Himalayan yak, how can you argue that one sound is giving you more information over another, when the only information that's really relevent is the note?
Maybe I've misread, and/or, misunderstood, but I was under the impression that the CSR sounds are not exactly based on engine rpm because of a software limitation, and as such are not as accurate an indication of engine speed as the original sounds.
You mean sythesizer vs sampler. MIDI is just a controller for both.
What I find cool about CSR since it uses OutGauge for input is that, if you could get the sensors on your real car on throttle and brake pedal positions, rpm and speedo gauges, you could hook it up with CSR on a laptop and drive your real (bad sounding) car with the sound of anything you wanted (meaty powerful engine) on your cars sound system or headphones. How strange and disconnected would that feel.
I can definatly relate to what you are sensing, I do club racing and autocross, and being able to hear the cars response to what I am doing is a vital part of driving, the "strain" of the engine for example, you cant always tell if you are losing time to being out of rev band if you can correctly hear your engine, the LFS sound engine has always provided me a good feel for the "strain" of the enigine, but i always have to glance over at the tach beause im not sure what rpm range im in, so if you had better sounds to more accuratly sense that, it could definatly help...
Sinbad i really reccomend this mod, breaths fresh life into the feel of the game, and doest take away original samples , you can set the mix between the default ingame sound and CSR.
I find there is very little lag indeed (im running opteron @2.8ghz :P)
What do you think gives you the right to insult my people, my country, and my President all in the same sentence? This is an international forum so please have the common courtesy to restrain from such baseless attacks on somebody just because of where they are from.
silver bullet, this is a world community, but it is mostly UK/Europe based in the community. Unfortunately, for some reason, LFS does not have a very big base in the US or Americas. You get use to this abuse from around the world. It is common knowledge that the majority of the world hates the US and it's practices by the government. It doesn't reflect on how they feel personally against you or I.
On topic, I am going to give the sound mod another go tonight. I just checked and saw that it is updated slightly from when I first tried it.
The sound still only helps due to the fact that someone is driving something they did not drive before or very little. If you take 2 people with the same skills and experience and give one the synthesized sound and the other muddle the synth sounds with sampled sounds over top, the one using the synth sounds will get more feedback from the car, thus drive better using that feedback. Equal skills and experience of course. Thus the original topic of "does sound matter" meaning the difference between the crappy sounding synthesized sound and better sounding but less feedback sampled sounds
It's probably worth checking out for yourself (IMO don't knock it 'till you tried it). The most reliable indicator of whether something works or not is whether or not it works for you. As far as I can tell, CSR is in sync with what the revs are doing. There's no perceptible lag (on my machine atleast), the rev needle and the corresponding sound is in harmony. I therefore can't see any reason to believe that you'll end up with a less accurate sound representation because of CSR. If the needle itself is accurate, then everything should be just hunkydory.
edit:
If you can prove that the synth sounds provide some additional information other than simple 'tone/note/pitch' information- yeah, O.K. ...If not, then no.
The monkey thing in the White House. George Dubble Ya Buuuuuuuuuuuush. He's not doing a great deal except open the White House doors and shout to the world "Take the piss out of us. We're really thick!".
I don't experience any different performance-wise, I jump from a run with modded sound straight into one non-modded, for the first lap there's a sense of silence, but then very quickly I sink into the driving and when I am concentrating on the behavior of the car, the original sound provide just as much information as the modded sound because I practically don't feel a difference.
Exactly... The CSR is totally in sync with the revs and with the LFS engine, so i don't see how could i be slower or something with it..
You are really praising LFS sounds unnecessary... it really isn't that much informativier than the CSR....
The engine's "note", or as I read by that term - the fundamental frequency - is NOT the only thing important, yet without a serious effort it's the only thing that a sampled system can provide.
Engines sound different under different load, in turn at different RPM under varying amounts of load - their acoustic output characteristics change because of pressures, resonances and a plethora of other factors that combine to create what our ears perceive as sound.
Most "sample type sound engines" at best simply have an "Accelerate & full load" and "Decelerate, zero load" sample for certain specific RPMS. Then they vary the volume of each sample for intermediary throttle positions, messing with the sampled pitch before stepping to a new sample as the virutal revs change. Blipping the throttle, or even trying to smoothly exit a pit garage using the clutch creates a horrid audio blasphemy to me in any sample system I've ever heard. IE GTR2 sounds great provided you're full throttle on a straight, or zero throttle on under braking. Other than that, it sounds completely artificial to me, and that doesn't help immersion.
Again, samples only sound like real engines under narrow circumstances. Realtime created sounds are not as good barrelling down the straight (yet) but they have the far more important factor of being dynamic by nature, and as such have far more life and organic appeal to me. RBR actually sounds very good even in stock form. Some will say it's not possible to create a high fidelity reproduction in realtime, but just because nobody's done it perfectly yet doesn't mean it cannot be done.
Truthfully, it's a very unexplored field since corporations could never be bothered to do the R&D to develop it since it's easier and cheaper to do samples. With the likes of LFS, Todd W. and a handful of others interested, it probably won't be long before some breakthroughs are made. I'm 100% confident that the generated sounds in LFS will be breathtaking once they become a focus of the devs.
The engine's "note" may tell you the RPM, but nothing really more than that; and there is certainly a lot more of a tale to be told by your mill than simply what RPM it's at!
Please, could you either drop it, or continue with PMs? I was hoping that the politics thing was finally left alone, but I guess I was wrong. Neither this thread, nor the LFS forum is a place to discuss such stuff, and no matter who started it, there's no reason to continue shitting up this thread.
I am not entirely sure why you are accusing me of "shitting up" this thread, please quote Tristan or Fordman. All I did was voice my opinion that maybe it is not a good idea to insult people based on where they are from, especcially in this thread.
Sorry if I expressed myself wrong, but the "shitting up" wasn't directed specifically at you. Yet your, mine and everyone elses post regarding politics or being otherwise OT are exactly doing that: shitting up the thread.
And now back to "Sound, does it make a difference?" please.
That's great and all, but to be honest- I don't really hear anything with the standard sounds that isn't just a (perhaps slightly duel) tone going up and down, mediated by the throttle. The 'pressures, resonances and plethora of other factors' must be getting lost on me somewhere there. It's hardly 'dynamic'. I'm not trying to be antagonistic here, I'm just trying to work things out and get to the bottom of why people think the CSR system is so hopelessly inaccurate.
Well I'd heard that it's generated but never looked into it. They never seemed to have a lot of "character", but overall sound was pretty good IIRC (haven't played it for ages). I find LFS's more informative TBH but then partial throttle isn't really something that occurs a lot in RBR
But if they are generated then it shows that a generated sound can still have some "rawness" appeal when barreling along full throttle. If they're not generated, then it doesn't show that
Well, in LFS I can tell how much boost pressure there is by the change in character of the engine sound. This is simply not true with samples, and no other sim really attempts to model the acoustics of turbocharged engines at all. No LFS isn't great aestetically in this area, that's obvious. However the fundamental things that make engines sound the way they do are present. Much needs to be done to finish that foundation; clearly, but for accuracy it's not even worth debating which method is more accurately able to convey changes in load / damage / intake pressure etc etc. Note that I have nothing against CSR or the people who use it. I simply prefer not to, and I have my reasons which not many people share
Although the sounds in LFS "are" dynamic, I understand your comment about it - but the fact remains that they are inherantly dynamic by their very nature. They will grow even more "dynamic" in the context you meant as they're developed further.