Polyphony Digital at Fischer Racing GmbH

  • Thread starter Mr_Hansen
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Mr_Hansen

Mr_Hansen

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Mr_Hansen
Last year I attended the education of Automotive Technology, which in short teaches you how to be a Race Engineer. I 'dropped' out recently to start on Computer Science instead, but still talk to some of my old class mates.

To get to the point, a guy I knew from a class a year above mine, and still talk to, is at internship at Fischer Racing GmbH in Germany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_Racing).
Today he made a short Facebook post about how some "Playstation programmers" had been visiting them today, and I obviously had to ask about further details.
Turns out a group of people from Polyphony Digital had been there for around eight hours today, taking pictures and apparently also recording sounds of the cars. The cars was stationary and in neutral during the recording though, and only tested at 2000- and 3000 rpm - so it might have been for idle sounds exclusively..

The cars in question are an Aston Martin DBR9, Aston Martin Vantage GT3 and a Ford GT (presumably the GT's used in GT Masters and the FIA GT3 European Championship).

I wish I could give more precise information, but as per usual with these kinds of stories, it's not the Gran Turismo fanatic who experiences it first hand. Hope it someone will find it interesting.
 
If ya gonna put the DBR9 in, get the sound bloody right. Or else GTFO PD.
 
That's all the info we really needed. Of course you probably will be criticized without any pictures or the like, but I will take it and be excited. Thanks for sharing! :D:tup:
 
Thanks for the info. Really interesting.

Sounds...one of the things that PD does bad in the game. I always test the cars trying to "simulate" realistic conditions to see if they sound just a "little bit realistic" and I found that if you keep revs lower than 4000rpm and never pushing the gas to the top it will sound close to the thing, but after that is when the "digital" recreated sounds comes in to ruin everything. (the famous "vacuum cleaner" sound)

The best example is the stock BMW M3. Try to drive it like going to the mall (slowly) not racing like a nut. And if possible the better result is by using the manual gearbox with clutch (G25/27 and T500RS)
Push the gas until mid part more or less and don´t go above 4000rpm and make gears like driving in the street.
The car sounds quite similar to the real one (I owned one) but if you push it is when all the sound is ruined.


(SORRY FOR OUT OF TOPIC but if he said that they record the sound at 2000 and 3000rpm...now I know why all cars sounds really bad after that)
 
If this is indeed true, this is good news.

I personally don't have an issue with the sounds in GT5, but any improvement is always welcome.
 
Well if they only got the lower revs for the AM, the upper rev range sound like the HSV anyway. That will save them some time. D'OH!
 
Fischer Racing Aston Martin at Silverstone ... maybe we can recreate this in GT in the future ... do want :)

yd_amr_dbr93.jpg


1024px-FIA-GT-1-WM-Aston-Martin-Nr.8.jpg
 
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Do you think you could find a bigger picture and post it instead?

I can't quite see all the details in that pic.
 
What's the point? It's not even the right DB9 they're recording, what makes them think a race-modified Aston will emit the same sound?
 
Fantastic news,oh and I really am not worried about tthe sounds I honestly think PD have already taken note and we will see improvements come.GT6
 
Interesting news, if true then that means we may finally have a "real" Ford GT race car and not the fantasy ones we have in the game already. Still, 8 hours for 3 cars?
 
So for DBR9 idle will be right, middle rpm too, only highest revs will use awful Pagani Zonda R sample from GT5 again, because it's racing V12 too...
 
So, they only recorded the car in free revving, and only at 2000 and 3000 rpm. That is highly significant. I'm pretty sure in the past they've recorded a much wider range of rpms and many cars were put on track and / or a dyno.

For some reason PD no longer think that's necessary. As I said, highly significant, and pretty exciting, potentially.
 
SimonK
Exciting how?
Click to expand...

Well, it won't make a difference to a PS3 game, I don't think; expect any new cars to continue re-using existing sounds. But for the PS4, the extra memory allows for more and larger buffers and the extra processing power unlocks the door to some heavy DSP usage that GT5 already demonstrates some serious chops with.

One possibility is that they're simply taking reference recordings to characterise the car's sound, or rather measure particular aspects of it, and use that in some kind of model. But I'll stop there, as I don't want to get too technical. ;)

Another possibility, of course, is that they already have other recordings, and these are supplemental somehow, which would change nothing. The fact that they're close together is promising in terms of attention to detail, but (some?) previous cars were already recorded every 1000 rpm anyway (going from memory from around the time of GT2). What often happens is they're recorded in an exponentially increasing set of engine speeds (2k and 3k implies the series 0.88, 1.33, 2, 3, 4.5, 6.75k etc.) because we hear pitch logarithmically (sorry, technical again...).

Even if they keep the current sample-based approach, the PS4 will allow for more samples to be kept in memory and for those samples to be longer / higher quality / both. Both of these things (when the mis-allocation issue isn't upsetting things) are the key issues "crippling" GT5's sounds in their current framework.

There's probably much more to it than we're seeing here, and it puts the comments surrounding the recording of that Scion, or whatever it was Hyundai, into broader context, too (remember that was on a dyno, though).
 
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This is great news!
I went to see one stage of the FIA GT series in 2011, at Interlagos, and if I'm not wrong that DBR9 was one of the competitors, along with the C6 Corvette which appears in one of the pictures.
The engine sounds were beautiful, but the Aston's was in a class of its own.
 
If PD botches the sound again with GT6 i'm going to go insane. We all know sound is a weak point in GT5, anyone who says it isn't must not have ears. Recording sound while the car is in neutral = fail... Please please please tell me there is more to this story.
 
Still hoping that they "sex up" the sounds so they sound more like they do when I'm standing next to a car or sitting in one.
 
Mr_Hansen
The cars in question are an Aston Martin DBR9, Aston Martin Vantage GT3 and a Ford GT (presumably the GT's used in GT Masters and the FIA GT3 European Championship).
Click to expand...

I imagine using a Aston GT3 :rolleyes: :drool:. I was already happy with the Z4 GT3, SLS and R8 LMS Ultra (Audi Sport Team Phoenix), wanted more GT3 cars, would be a real Nurburgring 24h ...
 

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