The reason why the sounds in the GT series have sounded "flat" is due to them recording the car sound at idle or free revving and digitally raising the RPM. This is what Turn10 did with Forza 1 also and the sound in Forza 1 also sounded very flat. The engine sounds in GT4 and Forza 1 didn't have "load" to them.
Well if we go deeper into that, sound
samples will never have real "load" in them. Real engine produces sound, in games there are just pre-recorded sound files that are played. One sound file sounds always the same (only in lower or higher pitch). With pre-recorded sounds you can't have that diversity or variety in the engine noise. Maybe if you recorded own sound sample for every rpm but that's long way to go... for example PC titles GT Legends and GTR2 (which imho have done best job at using pre-recorded sounds) has only 6-8 sound samples per car: one for "idle", "low", "medium" and "high" throttle on and the same files for "throttle off" occasions, then the files are just mixed together according the rpm and the shortcoming is that it will only sound good when at full acceleration, with only couple of sound samples it is very inaccurate in other situations.
In future, I believe there's going to be an alternative way of doing this, a real-time synthesized sound engine. Basicly that avoids this by actually creating sound instead of just playing pre-recorded sound files, a bit like a virtual engine. The sound is created from very very short engine pulse sounds, shorter than 0.05 seconds (compare to the usual sound sample in games which is 2-5 seconds). It's already in use in couple of PC platform sims but results are not yet so great but the system has potential to sound more realistic in the future than the pre-recorded sounds way ever will.
Here's good example how it works made by a guru called Todd Wasson.
It's a fact? Really? I don't even think you could list 10,000 games that even have licensed production cars in them let alone games with licensed production cars that have real damage and roll over... but you obviously do or you would not have emphasized it being a "fact", so by all means, share this factual list of games that qualify if you can. Otherwise please leave the gross exaggerations to the politicians. 👍
Ok, I did exaggerate to make the point clearer and that fact word was a bit too much, I grant you that.
As for the roll over point, this one has been discussed before, and in the past I have asked for examples of games that contain licensed road cars that roll over, to date no one has been able to name a game that featured it. Yes plenty of games with licensed 'race' cars have it, but not road cars.
Thanks for the information and the link, interesting.
About games with licensed (production, not race) cars with rolling over... these came to my mind without much thinking,
Viper Racing (released in 1998) and
Need for Speed (5): Porsche Unleashed (released in 2000 and I'm pretty sure previous NFS games had it too) and
Mercedes Benz World Racing (released in 2004, also had a sequel). I could try to dig up more examples later. All these are major car manufacturers and didn't seem to have problem with it... these are somehow old games but I doubt manufacturers' opinion has changed. Viper Racing even had a funny feature (not cheat code) that when you pressed a certain button, the car jumped in the air. The game had a dynamic car deformation, so you could really make the car the look like a pile of steel junk.
I used exaggeration because it is simply the easiest way to get the discussion going.
I believe the "manufacturers' don't like damage" is just half of the truth... other half is, well god knows what. Many games have only cosmetic damage but it is still better than nothing at all and proves that games can have damage. Altough personally I couldn't less care about falling off bumpers and visual stuff like that, for me most important thing is how the car acts in contact situations and how it affects the car internally. I'm also PC sim gamer so the visual stuff have always been secondary priority. Best damage is in Richard Burns Rally: crash once into a tree and the rally is over and also the game has yet the most complicated mechanical damage.
And there is just isn't any real prove that PS2 technically could not handle damage. Lots of other games on PS2 have had damage, even PS1 could do it. Actually, if we go back to early 90's, even Microprose Grand Prix Formula One had damage. And that was in year 1992 on Intel IBM 386 computer! Before someone says that in 1992 graphics were so plain... of course and graphics have gone a long way but so is the technical power of computers and consoles and in a quite exponential way.
Like we can see from the videos, there is still no damage. Even PS3 can't handle it? Or it it because of the manufacturers saying "nay"? Which reason is it, it depends on the day? PD just seems to be the only developer that have had and still seems to have an issue with damage. And only developer that always seem to blame something else for not implementing it. Maybe they just don't want to do it or don't know how they'd like to do it. I don't want to sound rude but the Kazunori's explanations are getting really old.
That's not the new sound engine, that's the old one. And an old build of the game, too, as I previously noted from the Atari rearview mirrors, which have since been fixed. On-site reports from the game shows, including people on this forum who were there, indicate a noticable improvement. I just wish the rest of us could hear it. Instead, all we get are official replays with dubbed-over pre-recorded audio, and off-screen video where you can't hear the game at all over the crowd noise.
As far as I've understood that's the video that got leaked from the official site... or is it that one? If it is, it's not that old build. Anyhow, so far it's still the closest indication what to expect.
👍
. Now imagine you take an F430 and slam is head on into a concrete wall at 180mph. There'd be nothing left of the driver but pink goo. From technical stand-point even if the PS3 was capable of this rendering this sort of damage real-time, would it actually ever be given the manufacturers OK? I think not.
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