With S1 I spend a lot of time just changing engine parameters with LFStweak.. In line 3 engines are common in small cars like the mini type one in LFS, and they can sound pretty cool! In line 5 sound orgasmic, some Volvo's and the quick Ford focus use these.. Flat 4 sounds very Subaru, V10 sound pretty hot.. etc etc.

Imo this would be a nice way to show off the sound engine as it actually makes believable noises for any cylinder configuration and we'd have more variety. Power / torque curves can stay the same, just the engine configuration (and thus noise) would have to be changed..

Best of all, it would take about 0 time to do, just give some of the cars different engine sound parameters.. :O

The devs really need to ditch the realtime sound engine crap and just use pre recorded sounds.

I was racing yesterday and man... the closer I focused on the sounds, it really comes out clearly how dry and boring the sounds are. In a sense, you are just listening to a crappy polyphonic cellphone ringtone, constantly

All the details... missing. I know people want an ignition sound, I sure as hell do... would be nice if you had to turn on your car while leaving the pits, and actually hear it. Ambience sounds, pit lane sounds, environment noises, more interior noises while in the car (just watch a incar racing flick, you hear so much more than just wind and engine), man all that stuff!

Right now it feels like I have 10 pounds of earwax in my ear canal and cannot hear a thing

So for any sound improvements, even if they aren't the car sounds... I am all for

I reckon the passengers should makes sounds too...

Roll it, you hear them scream.. LOL..

Tweak, I have 20 pounds of cotton buds for sale... that will only cost you $300.00 US. Might help your ear problem

Oh by the way Niels... the sound engine currently DOES rely on the cyliners in the engine. (4 cylinders have a inline noise, 8's are throaty and loud, etc) But I stil don't think they sound all that great

like i said.. the devs need to use pre recorded sounds... you cant simulate everything. Plus pre recorded sounds would cut down on cpu load.. and overall sound 500% better.

I don't mind the sounds, they seem to suit all the vehicles pretty well, but I think there's room for improvement. GTRs could use some gearbox-whine and maybe some backfires. The LXs could stand to sound a tad more throaty and "alive" and I'm sure other racers have their opinions on what could be improved. If there could be a difference between in-car and external view sounds (as in RL) that would completely rock too...

Having said that, S2 is still in its alpha stage and I'm sure the devs are getting their heads around everything in good time

As for reducing CPU load, anything that can do that is fine by me and my old rig

I have to argue with the prerecorded sound idea. For one thing, when you pitch sounds that much, say from idle to 10,000rpm, they really sound bad at one extreme or the other, or both.

Second. Sounds pitching off the charts like that create massive distortion that is not healthy for our ears. Anyone play N2K or GPL for hours on end and notice ringing or compression in their ears afterwards? Even if they played at low volume?

Third. Bit truncation and square wave distortion. Also really hard on the ear drums. There is no way to avoid these problems in third party sounds considering the general lack of knowledge and crappy software that I would assume most, if not all, LFS devotees will produce these sounds with. And, at the risk of making an incorrect assumtion publicly , that perhaps the DEVs are not aware of the finer details of handling digital audio.

But mostly, it's just the sound quality I don't like. Sure, at the sample rate rev, real sounds sound cool. But up and down the range synth sounds are better and have the potential to sound very much real.

I'd like to refute that. LFS needs more ear candy BLING and less simulator schmilumator simulations for the sake of simulating.

BLING does the brain Good! :smash:

Quote from Rotary :

I reckon the passengers should makes sounds too...

Roll it, you hear them scream.. LOL..

Tweak, I have 20 pounds of cotton buds for sale... that will only cost you $300.00 US. Might help your ear problem

Oh I like the sound of that idea. We have room for 4 passengers right? Have the front passenger be really into it, look at apex and even maybe immitate the engine. Then let's have the center rear passenger be always very scared and either scream or do like girlish sounds (depending on the g-force). Then we could have the left and right rear passengers being fearless and bored and argue on your technique while telling the center passenger to shut up when he screams too loud and they can't hear each other anymore.
Dammit that would make some interesting races. I'll volunteer to make some voices of one of the annoying rear passengers.
- brrrmmmm
- esshh that was close
- ya maybe a bit too close, try hitting the curb less next time
- use as much of the track as possible too
- AAAHHHHHHRRRGGGGG
- shut up
- brrmm
- that one was nice
- hahaha missed a shift
- need to clutch later
- eek
- wow nice slide
- catched it back well too

Edit: on topic now: As I've comented many many many times, the actual engine sound at the moment doesn't sound so bad. In fact it's pretty good, maybe just needs a little more raspiness in some cases. Some cars like the lx4 and lx6 sound very good IMO tho. The problem ATM is the LACK OF SOUNDS. See there's like only the engine and wind whereas there should be many others. I certainly hope sounds improvements are very far up on Scawen's to-do list.

I completely disagree with using prerecorded sounds in LFS. For starters theres a lot of work that would have to go into recording the sounds, and multiple engine samples for different RPM and load, then there is creating the sound engine and setting up parameters for mixing them all together. And thats got to be done for each and every car.

The real time system scawen has created for LFS is probably one of the BEST inovations I have ever seen in video games. Its absolutely brilliant, and I would think, easier to make and maintain.

Having said that, the sound in LFS is shit. But not because its been designed that way and is incapable of doing better, but more because its an interim feature until scawen has time to dedicate to making the sounds more advanced. The system is fantastic, and ill never forget the first time I used LFSTweak on the demo cars to make a WRX replica... WOW!

Does anybody know how i could get started in making a similar system and whats involved, Id love to give it a try.

Quote from Sketchy :

Does anybody know how i could get started in making a similar system and whats involved, Id love to give it a try.

Programming-wise I have only a vague idea - but in any case you'll need the math so read up on trigonometry. However what I've found, practically, so far using a synthesizer is that you can create a similar result by using a gated noise generator and a limited delay line fed back into the mix through an LP filter. Sync that with an LFO, you don't need a high freq oscillator for that, and then it's mostly time tweaking fun - you might need a clock divider as well to simulate the explosion in the second set of cylinders.

That's basically a sort of a Karplus-Strong method, search the web for it - it's good for simulating strings mostly but tweaking it around it can do some decent percussion. Ofcourse there are more complicated ways of doing it too, but maintaining decent control over harmonics is hard.

You know after trying an F1 mod with Mechanik I'm very impressed with S2 sounds, it really does mind me of an F1 car! However, the system is far from perfect, nobody is arguing that, but the potential of the system is great.

IMO the note is too hard and not organic enough (not enough frequencies being generated).

might crank out the ol q basic and have a **** around, can you do midi with that?

As someone said there is the only the bang per cylinder fire being generated, each bang being timed and cycled to the engine configuration.

So its just the amount of details that need to be implemented which will create a nice natural note. If you think of the cylinder fire as one cycle and then add additional "cycles" to create a more detailed engine noise. For exammple have another cycle that has sound properties to create a somewhat "ticking raspyness" and have it so that it play alongside the original cycle. If you made that to be played at louder and higher pitches as the rpm rises, partilcularily as the engine reaches redline then you would get quite an audible difference in engine harmonics. It would certainly help in hearing how the engine stresses up top. Then additionally perhaps another "cycle" that created a constant low pitch humm to add an exhaust drone type of effect.

Really the possibilities are endless, and in the end you could create quite a detailed and natural sounding engine note. Then eventually adding such things as transmission wurr, and or bearing noises for the wheels. Wow... Im about too.... climax (who said that? )

I think you'll find many more sims using sythd sounds in the future. NetKar Pro is looking at using that or samples (depending on success), and I think you'll find it'll end up with the real time stuff... [/prediction].

I like the LFS sounds from a driving point of view more than any other games sounds. The engines feel alive and respond in the correct manner. In GTR/GTL for example it ALWAYS sounds the same, because the samples are the same. It might sound nice for a few laps, but I can't help getting annoyed at the lack of aural feedback in those.

The "Sound" function in Qbasic rocked. Dont mock. In terms of controlling the soundcard directly that was much more difficult. Shame you're pretty limited to beeps, although I'm sure with enough work you could emulate midi

I used to spend so many lessons buggering around with qbasic......ah those were the days

Edit:
Back on topic, with the synth system LFS uses, I feel I "understand" the car a bit more than in comparison to GTR, etc. Plus the whole thing is extensible - fantastic

LFS engines just sound too clean and pure. They need those extra sounds, rattles, sucks, whines and so on to even come close. When I blip the throttle on the grid I'd like to hear more than the revs just rising.

Bob or others,

Is there a util around that allows me to change the engine sound parameters in S2? I'd like to have a go at that again

Well, the engine sounds are pretty good in terms of information. But I think we need more other sounds like suspension rustle when going over curbs and transmission noise. I have loads of in-car videos about different cars and when looking at those I see clearly what LFS is missing.

I am currently trying to make a Dodge viper tweak and the sounds are actually quite close what I want (with redline at 6000rpm and 8,3 litre engine, though it's not flat in real life ). But the engine sounds need some more kick. It sounds a little to synthetic atm. And transmission sound should be very loud when releasing throttle and using engine braking, very loud in awd cars (?).

Quote from xaotik :

Programming-wise I have only a vague idea - but in any case you'll need the math so read up on trigonometry. However what I've found, practically, so far using a synthesizer is that you can create a similar result by using a gated noise generator and a limited delay line fed back into the mix through an LP filter. Sync that with an LFO, you don't need a high freq oscillator for that, and then it's mostly time tweaking fun - you might need a clock divider as well to simulate the explosion in the second set of cylinders.

Got some questions. What synth are you using? What's the gate for, individual cylinders? How is the delay line *limited*? What do you hook the gas pedal up to?

Quote from thisnameistaken :

So you use more than one sample; this was a lesson learned in the '80s. A good 32Mb grand piano will sound just like a grand piano to your average listener, you'd need even less data for an engine because it's not such a pure note.

A lesson I learned from NR2K is that mixing those samples to be convincing is not an easy task. Partly because the engine sound is not a pure note. It's very complex, and partly because we are not playing one note then the next, but rather gliding up through the pitch. It's much easier to hear small differences that way. As far as data goes. A sample is a sample and takes exactly so much space.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

You'd need to go to the track with a few good mics, filters and a DAT, and bundle the lot into the cockpit of twenty or so cars. I don't see how you'd manage that with the single-seaters though

Aah... but that's the easy part, isn't it? Getting a good sample is fairly simple if you know what you're doing. Forget the filters, pick the right mics and put them in the right place. It's the handling of the sample after the fact that is rough. Another lesson I learned from every Sierra game sound I've analyzed is that no one at Sierra had a clue what they were doing. The work looked like it had been done by a ten year old. Great programmers. Bad plummers.

Quote from thisnameistaken :

Anyway I think the synth sounds are an interesting way to go, and have plenty of room for improvement. Given that the dev team is so small, if they switched to using samples adding new cars would become a huge amount of work.

Yeah, certain pitches need to cause different resonances in the cockpit, stuff rattling or buzzing would be cool.

That's the beauty of the whole deal. The synth can be made convincing. It seems to be more directly connected to the right foot and different cars is all a matter of how much time you put into each one. Modifications are a matter of the same. ...and all this without having to leave the house.

In the end, I'd be really interested to know how they are creating the sounds. Did they write their own software? Something off the shelf?

What do you hook the gas pedal up to?

I was actually pleasantly surprised when I checked out the new tool from fonnybone today. I got some engineconfigurations that really sounded great! In general I feel like the sound engine sounds much better at low revs than at high revs.
But trying these configurations gave me hope that lfs indeed has the potential to blow everything else away, soundwise.
As said above, the next big thing on the list should be ambient noises, and other in car sounds, especially gearwhine.

all in all, this is definately the way to go. multisample engines like gtr and gtl sound good, but they are at their absolute peak. it doesn´t get any better than gtl. and now compare a real life cobra to the gtl one. it sound like it perhaps, but it doesn´t feel like it.

lfs and netkars approach is definately the way to go

I have very little idea how the mechanics of sounds work, but I'd say that LFS gives about the same amount of information as N2003 does, although it is true that it does hurt your ears after a while, so I guess maybe someone could look into a sound pack to solve this?

GTR/GTL don't come close, they sound like they are almost using one power on and one power off sample.

The ultimate sound has to be GPL with GPLSO (http://www.gplso.co.uk/)

I have been playing a fair bit of rFactor at the mo, better offline AI until I complete a house move and set up my system properly again, and while the initial sound is impressive it is not informative.

I would like to hear the transmission noise get into LFS. I think with this added it will boost the engine sound a great deal by giving far more complexity to it.

does rFactor still use 1 sample like the multiplayer demo?