I don't know if this is a bug because what I think is wrong with the gear whine seems to be intended by Scawen. However:

Why is the gear whine not directly aligned with the car speed?

As this video (you probably know) shows, it should be.

In LFS this is not the case. I always felt like it but now that I'm S2 licensed I'm pretty sure I found evidence: I took out the XFR. In "Shift+A" I turned gear whine volume to 2.0 and gear whine muffling to 0.5.

I exit the pit box in first gear reaching 78km/h (if you use mph you may not know this is the max. speed which you can drive with the pit speed limiter on).
Now if I shift gears up to 6th without leaving my right foot from the gas pedal and thus without changing the cars speed still though the pitch of the gear whine sound moves down.

I think (code-wise) it's easier to link the pitch directly to car speed than to do it the way it is. Thus it must be intentional. I just don't know why.




(My personal version of a) Technical explaination (that could be wrong):
In most cases a racing gear box will make a whining noise because the gear wheels are cut straight in contrast to helical cut gears in road cars gearboxes.
As you'll notice all (forward) gear wheels are in permanent mesh. That way it is not possible for the whining sound to change in pitch when gears are shifted.

You'll find that the engine revs drop in a higher gear (for a given speed), so the gearbox internals will be turning at different rates. Plus, not all gears are transferring torque, even though they are in constant mesh. It's possible to have only one gear whine, whilst all the others are quiet - this is shortly followed by a gearbox stripdown to find out why!!

Surely the gear whine is the noise of all the gears working together - at a high RPM and low gear theres going to be more rotations and noises, as a pose to a lowere RPM where you'd have less rotatios...?

Quote from tristancliffe :

You'll find that the engine revs drop in a higher gear (for a given speed), so the gearbox internals will be turning at different rates. Plus, not all gears are transferring torque, even though they are in constant mesh. It's possible to have only one gear whine, whilst all the others are quiet - this is shortly followed by a gearbox stripdown to find out why!!

Thanks for this fast and useful reply. I agree that only a loaded gear wheel will make the sound. Some things I still don't understand right. The output shaft with attached gear wheels has the same speed as the car (driving in a plane straight line with 100% tyre grip etc...) so it is better to describe that the sound pitch is both dependant on the speed of the car and the revs of the engine connected to the gear box. That does also mean that it depends on the number of teeth the meshed gear wheels have.


Still if you watch the linked video it almost seems it's the opposite to LFS. With every gear shifted up the whine seems to increase in pitch and vice versa. Why could that be so?


Edit: Excuse me for 10 Minutes... have to shovel some snow here.^^

Which gears produce the most noise mostly depends on the specific gears. You can modify the differential(/final drive ratio) and get a dominant gear whine that rises with velocity, or modify the gearbox and get a noise that rises with the revs.

Which gears produce the most sound really depends on the individual gears and the acoustic efficiency of the pairings, so it can be widely different for different cars.

Vain

Maybe the ratio has an effect on the pitch. A taller gear (numerically smaller) perhaps resonates at a higher pitch than a shorter gear. And as you change up through the 'box, maybe you're just hearing this change in pitch...

I don't know. I've never really thought about it, so I'm just thinking out loud.

I agree the output shafts stay at the same (wheel) speed, but the input shaft has to match engine revs though, so the 'box internals spin at different rates (by the magic of gearing).

Quote from tristancliffe :

Maybe the ratio has an effect on the pitch. A taller gear (numerically smaller) perhaps resonates at a higher pitch than a shorter gear. And as you change up through the 'box, maybe you're just hearing this change in pitch...

I don't know. I've never really thought about it, so I'm just thinking out loud.

I agree the output shafts stay at the same (wheel) speed, but the input shaft has to match engine revs though, so the 'box internals spin at different rates (by the magic of gearing).

I was just about to post another huge pile of dirt that no one will be able to encrypt because foreign language+technical terms=failure.

Hopefully the devs will see this thread and give me an answer.



Thanks though for an adult conversation and to everyone who refused to spam this thread with loads of... well - spam.^^

Sorry to dig that one out again but I'm still wondering...

Appearantly what's been recreated in LFS is a sound that the individual gearing pairs make when a specific gear is shifted. Thus at the same speed different gears result in different pitches. (Try on your own with the pit limiter and Shift+A)

What makes the awesome sound in the video of the first post seems to be the final drive though.

That would explain why the pitch of the sound is more or less directly linked to the speed of the car.

Maybe the LFS like sound is based on a real gear box whine? I'd like to see examples if anyone knows any video that shows this.

And again I invite any of the developers to state something or show examples.

Quote from tristancliffe :

It's possible to have only one gear whine, whilst all the others are quiet

My dad's Audi 100 C4 whines ONLY at 3rd gear.

skoda felicia whines at 1, 3 and 5 gear. my bmw e30 whines all the time xD (differential)