Update 1.12 Car Sound Profile Rebalanced Discussion

EDIT: the only differnce I heard is of Nitrous. I dont remember pressing it on idle would make a sound before..(like GT4) ,then again I dont use much Nitrous maybe it was from the start
I don't recall hearing the Nitrous when I activated it in 1.11, yet I heard it in 1.12, this is definitely new. đź‘Ť
 
if its on uphill or downhill corners especially then it might just be the bumpiness of the individual polygons that cause this. most GT6 tracks are unrealistically smooth, with no real bumps in them at all, which leads to a rather lifeless driving sensation. sierra seems to not have as many polys in the road surface, which despite being less desireable in turn leads to a more lively driving experience.

I actually think it might be wheel hop. I just can't imagine having so few polygons in the track that you'd get physical bumps in the road. Especially since when you hear the bumping it's not crazy fast.

It's also possible that they've just modified the tire sounds to replicate the skipping to make them sound more realistic.
 
I thought something seemed different when I was playing the other day...The tires seemed quieter and this might be me going crazy but the sound of tires losing grip seems to be a little different. I was on Sierra the other day with my Golf R and I noticed on some corners the tires sounded like they were almost skipping across the ground rather than that one giant sliding noise we used to get.

Anyone else know what I'm talking about?

I thought I noticed the same thing. There does seem to be more chirping and skipping going on.

I think I've noticed rev limiter bounces sounding better too, as well as revs stuttering over uneven surfaces like curbing, a bit more realistically than before.
 
I'm unable to use my surround at this point and I'm stuck on old headphones so I'm not getting the full effect, if any. Note this is not a discussion thread about the overall quality of GT sounds, you can find that in the Sound Update Thread in the Kaz Forum.

Wait, you're not sure if you'll be able to appreciate differences in engine sound because you're 'only' using headphones?
No offence but the way some of you take the game seriously, I might as well be playing Mario Kart.
 
Anyone else noticing yet that something in the sound changes when the car is down on power slightly because of needing an oil change? Even when the oil is still green in the gt garage, but you're just being robbed of a few horses?
 
Anyone else noticing yet that something in the sound changes when the car is down on power slightly because of needing an oil change? Even when the oil is still green in the gt garage, but you're just being robbed of a few horses?

I don't have cars with so much mileage but I may check for this later.
 
I actually think it might be wheel hop. I just can't imagine having so few polygons in the track that you'd get physical bumps in the road. Especially since when you hear the bumping it's not crazy fast.

It's also possible that they've just modified the tire sounds to replicate the skipping to make them sound more realistic.

It's wheel hop, when I first sank my teeth into Sierra I was driving my my GT3 tuned C7 and as I was turning one of the few slow to medium corners I heard my tired chirping as I was slightly over driving. So I watched the replay and lo and behold the camera view was in an ideal position and gave me a nice view of my inside right rear tire bumping up and down rapidly due to bumps and me riding on the edge of grip. I should have saved that but I can probably do it again as I love sport hard tires and the new course. I think there was even more visual acuity added to suspension movement as my cars on street tires do not run ridiculously high spring rates, there are about 5-8% stiffer than stock in my tunes.
 
The changes are only subtle to my ears.

It does seem like there is a change in "EQ" to the sounds, but on an individual, per-source basis. This probably means PD used their low-pass filter on the engine sound, and also on the exhaust sound but in a more "open" state, and "reversed" it for the turbo effects, before re-adjusting all the gains to compensate. If the gain adjustments have resulted in a different balance, that would be noticeably different without the "EQ tweak", but there are other subtle signs.

If I get what you're saying here, yes, what they appear to have done is adjust gain on separate car sound elements so that one does not overpower parts of the frequency range of another (as much). THIS is why people think turbos are louder. They may in fact be, but what is important is the balance of other highs against this high freq element. As you suggest, they appear to have brightened up the EQ for the turbo as well, so both of those things might have made a turbo or its BOV stand out a little more. Roof cams exhibit this the best, IMO.

The highlighting of low-frequency detail in the engine samples helps to modulate the smooth exhaust sounds, in a way that intake sound (still absent) would - very clever, PD. Accentuating that same low frequency detail slightly in the exhaust gives the flow noise generator something to sink its teeth into, which gives the exhaust sound extra edge and depth (or just adds more blowiness for those exhaust sounds that are all noise already, e.g. a lot of stock exhausts) - again, very subtle, very clever. This subtle subverting of the sampling limitations implies PD have a deep understanding of what they are doing, which bodes well for any major update (GT7).

This is something I specifically asked them to do in my suggestion. You simply could never hear the appropriate "texture" of engines before (most of them) because certain frequencies were not highlighted and/or were being obscured by another (too loud) sound element.

There is something I can't quite understand, and that's how it doesn't get all woolly and droney with so much extra gain in the low end. Perhaps it's not just a simple low-pass filter, and maybe it's the "detail extraction" part of the flow noise generator on the exhaust used in a different way.
It does get "droney" in my video, but that is due to lack of proper capture techniques. I do not believe they replaced any sound sample files, so perhaps they had extra compression going on previously which is either tweaked or not being done any longer, which would allow us to hear more texture and dynamic aspects of engines and some other sounds?

There does not appear to be any major change with exhaust parts, unless only a few specific cars got a sample swap, as sometimes happened with GT5.
As someone else concurred, it does not seem to be that they replaced any exhaust upgrade sounds, but the changes in engine and exhaust tone overall, (either by a pass filter of some sort as you suggested or however they actually did it) seem to have caused the "effect" of having each exhaust part sound better than it did before.

Do you know enough about the game's code to know whether they would have had to apply filters to sounds in real-time as the game plays, or if they could have executed a script that altered them during installation, or whether it is most likely just a few settings changes within the game's underlying interface?
 
Very interesting talk here guys đź‘Ť

The sound bug at Circuito de la Sierra when playing online can be a sign that they could be using a real time filter or something over the sounds like you said @exXboxfan ? Because it doesn't make sense that a "sound update" could be affected by a new track added.
 
The less accurate the track, the more fun the physics...

So much for that FIA approved track accuracy!

So you'd prefer for instance, the Rodeo show that is the Codemasters modeling of Silverstone over GT's?

So tracks might not be 100% accurate, but not once in a F1 onboard do I recall that track being THAT harsh on suspension.
 
So you'd prefer for instance, the Rodeo show that is the Codemasters modeling of Silverstone over GT's?

So tracks might not be 100% accurate, but not once in a F1 onboard do I recall that track being THAT harsh on suspension.

No, I was really just making a joke. It was just directed towards the fact that one of the interesting elements of the new FFB engine effectively came down to potentially being the by-product of cutting the poly-count of steep corners. I truly appreciate the accuracy of GT's real-world tracks, and I feel it's one of the strongest aspects of the series. I remember the utter disappointment that was driving on FM4's Nurburgring after experiencing the epic GT version (although I am very happy with FM5's simulation of the course).
 
...

This is something I specifically asked them to do in my suggestion. You simply could never hear the appropriate "texture" of engines before (most of them) because certain frequencies were not highlighted and/or were being obscured by another (too loud) sound element.

In effect, yes. Although, I think the bigger issue in that respect is the absence of an important sound source: intake, which is more than just "aspiration" (which I assume to mean flow noise), see for example here. They have partially closed that gap by pulling out the details in the samples they have ("engine") and making it interact with the exhaust sound in the same way that a proper intake sound would. It's better, but still no replacement for the real deal. :)

It does get "droney" in my video, but that is due to lack of proper capture techniques. I do not believe they replaced any sound sample files, so perhaps they had extra compression going on previously which is either tweaked or not being done any longer, which would allow us to hear more texture and dynamic aspects of engines and some other sounds?

It's possible the dynamic range compressor is now no longer operating on the whole "signal", in a "broad-band" sense, but instead separately on a few different bands. I'd have to test it, although I'm not exactly sure how! :dopey:
The data compression in the samples is inherent, and they're basically some version of ATRAC; to change that would require additional and / or different sound sample data, akin to replacing samples outright.

I just found some alarming figures about what Grid achieves (page 57 here; PS3 version uses less memory than others, but has more sophisticated mixing and more concurrent sources), so it's possible there's plenty of room for extra source / stream processing in GT6.

As someone else concurred, it does not seem to be that they replaced any exhaust upgrade sounds, but the changes in engine and exhaust tone overall, (either by a pass filter of some sort as you suggested or however they actually did it) seem to have caused the "effect" of having each exhaust part sound better than it did before.

I personally think the majority of the effect is that the non-stock exhausts are louder again now, as they were at launch. Coupled with the other changes, I think that's the overall effect caused, as you say. I have not investigated the purported mileage / oil effect, though.

Do you know enough about the game's code to know whether they would have had to apply filters to sounds in real-time as the game plays, or if they could have executed a script that altered them during installation, or whether it is most likely just a few settings changes within the game's underlying interface?
Even procedurally patching all of those files would have led to a very long install time for what was (for GT6) only a relatively small update; that doesn't seem to have been the case. Another option is to patch it when it is next loaded, and (re-)save to the cache. I personally think it's more likely PD would have gone the real-time route, just in case they need to change it again in the near future! Either patching approach could lead to inconsistencies in the cached files depending on update history etc.

Besides, the new method is likely to be a processing intensive one, if the clues are to be believed, so that headroom should be there (see also: Grid, mentioned above).

Very interesting talk here guys đź‘Ť

The sound bug at Circuito de la Sierra when playing online can be a sign that they could be using a real time filter or something over the sounds like you said @exXboxfan ? Because it doesn't make sense that a "sound update" could be affected by a new track added.

We don't know the full range of interactions with the different sub-systems of the game, as they jostle for processing power. I think it's likely to be an extension of the existing sound drop-out problems in some way, as the symptoms sound exactly the same as what I experienced early on with the game. Has anyone else noticed that AndalucĂ­a is totally silent? I don't know of any other track like that, since there's normally ambience of some sort; I can't remember if the course maker themes were the same in GT5, though.

It might be some failure in the stream set-up / memory allocation, or in some dynamic source switching algorithm (total possible scene sources is likely to be far in excess of the number that the console can process at one time). It might be the finite-state machine getting its knickers in a knot (non-functional programming FTL, supposedly...)
 
I honestly don't notice any significant change.

It's like if they just "remixed the multiple layers of the same sample" (forgive me sound specialists, I don't know the technicalities about these things).

And yes, cars do sound a bit throatier and richer (most like the GT5 sound update), but at the end it's what I've been saying all this time: it really doesn't matter how rich and realistic your sounds are if your V12 Diablo sounds like a V10 or a V8, or anything that is not a twelve cylinder.
 
I honestly don't notice any significant change.

It's like if they just "remixed the multiple layers of the same sample" (forgive me sound specialists, I don't know the technicalities about these things).

And yes, cars do sound a bit throatier and richer (most like the GT5 sound update), but at the end it's what I've been saying all this time: it really doesn't matter how rich and realistic your sounds are if your V12 Diablo sounds like a V10 or a V8, or anything that is not a twelve cylinder.
That's a separate issue, as noted in the first post. ;)
Incidentally, I know of a 12 cylinder that was made to sound like a 4 cylinder (see here), but that's also a separate issue. :P
(That's the kind of detail we need, by the way, never mind what's keeping everyone else busy; i.e. the difference between 6-2, 6-1 or even 6-3 exhaust manifolding is actually really easy to replicate "procedurally", once you work out how the sound comes about).


I agree that there are similarities to the sound tweak released for GT5, but the approach is subtly different with the addition of apparent "EQ" tweaking and possible changes to the dynamic range compression etc.
 
I just hope this is the first hint of that theoretical sound update for GT6 Kaz was talking about.
On the other hand, this might have been "the update" for GT6 (which was only implied by omission, remember).

The changes required, and the changes I believe PD are working on, are far more fundamental than such subtle fine-tuning - any wide-sweeping changes will render that fine tuning effectively null.

Still, we can hope, but I'm not expecting anything special until GT7 is being paraded around.
 
On the other hand, this might have been "the update" for GT6 (which was only implied by omission, remember).

The changes required, and the changes I believe PD are working on, are far more fundamental than such subtle fine-tuning - any wide-sweeping changes will render that fine tuning effectively null.

Still, we can hope, but I'm not expecting anything special until GT7 is being paraded around.
I didn't really expect as much as an overhaul to the sample set themselves, but more of a tweak in their nature.
 
I'd like to see what others think about this. I'm unable to use my surround at this point and I'm stuck on old headphones so I'm not getting the full effect, if any.

Last night I switched from my PC speaker system (decent 2-channel amp and 6" Denon bookshelf speakers) TO a set of headphones (Denon.)
The sound is far better when using the headphones.
It's easier to pick up where cars behind you are, easier to hear individual tyres locking, etc

While my main HT setup has Audyssey room equalisation,
I doubt whether most peoples PS rig does.
Plus with the head-phones I can have the volume up much louder without annoying the wife
 
I didn't really expect as much as an overhaul to the sample set themselves, but more of a tweak in their nature.
I don't know how much further tweaking can go in respect of tangible "improvements". The next step is surely distortion...

And as for an overhaul of the samples, I'm thinking more fundamental than that, in that I don't see the need for samples any more. :D

Anything that isn't working in that direction is slowing that progress down, including, potentially, this recent rebalance.
 
I don't know how much further tweaking can go in respect of tangible "improvements". The next step is surely distortion...

And as for an overhaul of the samples, I'm thinking more fundamental than that, in that I don't see the need for samples any more. :D

Anything that isn't working in that direction is slowing that progress down, including, potentially, this recent rebalance.
Or maybe the feedback gained from tweaks done here can be used moving forward perhaps?
 
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