Outside people with your knowledge (a very, very small percentage of people) nobody really knows what they are talking about, or hearing for that matter when it comes to the sound issue. To me, the Red Bull/ Senna cars sound
better. Accurate? Haven't a clue. It's for this reason that in my opinion, Polyphony should go down the easier Forza/distortion road rather than the new method you have been describing which they may or may not be pursuing. I think that in the end, all there hard work and innovation will be wasted on people that will not be able to appreciate it (unless you tell me about it of course
)
I think Kaz has been testing the water on the low-fidelity front. Because the Red Bull cars etc. are pretty low-fi, and he did say they might need to "sex up" the sounds. LFS has incredibly low-fi sound, but the quality of the physics driving it (and the expressivity of the method used) more than makes up for that.
...
Are you busy in PD office or can you still post without Kaz seeing that you don't do your work? They have a new method since 2003 or something like that according to their blog. How is it possible that they didn't use it on the new cars? I believe you have said the hardware limitations, but then read the twitter post. Other developer worked within their limitations from the hardware and got much better results than PD.
There are a few examples of cars we know they recorded, and yet the samples they use in the game are clearly from another car. In fact, they're identifiable from earlier games. One example that I remember is the Audi R8 (V8), which was in GT5P; PD specifically mentioned they'd recorded it at Audi's own anechoic rolling road. The car in the game does not reflect this, and I heard another car (a Standard) recently that sounded exactly like the in-game version, but annoyingly I can't remember what it was. The HSV-010 went through three iterations, all using recycled samples from GT, and the latest version even borrows from TT; we were lucky it got such attention.
When you listen closely to practically all the cars, the sound they make is recognisable from earlier games; especially the modified sounds. The vast majority of sounds used date from GT2. The sampling format itself (schematically, not in terms of data storage) is the same as it was for GT2, broadly (we now have separate engine and exhaust sounds, and the bit rate is increased - still compressed, although
only lightly and psychoacoustically-motivated). So there's still only idle, low and high speed samples, and no dedicated on- and off- throttle samples.
Even if they were authoring samples to these same light-weight, GT2 specs (so as to stay within the same hardware limitations), why haven't PD used the new recordings they clearly have? My theory is that their aim is to not use recordings directly in the game any more, in favour of some kind of "simulation" (at some arbitrarily low level). I'll mention LFS again, because it was my inspiration for looking into this in detail, and resulted in my building such a system for myself. If you use an external program to change the engine configuration of a given car, the game automatically changes the sound to suit, without samples in the usual sense; the same settings on different cars sound different. I've no doubt some of the cleverest minds in the world, who have a lifetime's professional experience with sound generation, should be able to come up with something like it in function, and to a much better quality.
...
btw, the red bull cars that Griffith claims to pinpoint some change in system to me just sound like some standard GT-esque loops that have been processed in-game with a distortion algorithm, and not a particularly pleasant one either. But the distortion does mask a lot of the negatives of the looping system (ie covers some of the stretchiness) as well as adds upper high frequency (12khz+) content that was otherwise dropped by the sampling rate and compression scheme, which is a noticeable improvement over the average car.
...
Have you driven them yet?
When all I had to go on were videos / recordings of the cars, I thought the exact same thing, and posted as much in this thread.
Incidentally, how do you use "filtering" to change the pulsetrain pattern for on- and off-throttle tones, and how do you animate that according to the control inputs in an emergent fashion?
Also, if it's just a "DSP effect", why is it only applied to those cars, and only when
not in the data logger?
It's that "the simplest answer is usually right one" thing, except that you have to consider the whole system. If the simplest possible explanation for the part involves considerable personal invention to explain the whole, it's not so simple any more. The sound in GT has been something of a conundrum for some time.
Whether you use samples or not, it's still synthesis, a point you made yourself in the past. So the gamut of methods available are not constrained within any classical definition.
Have you played with LFS' sound modding capabilities? If not, I recommend getting the demo.
The most technical bits may be difficult but you'll get there.
