Originally published at: Artist/engineer built virtual simulation of an entire car engine to generate realistic vrooooom audio | Boing Boing
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Coming soon to Forza Horizon 7
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I imagine that the creators of Forza and Gran Turismo have probably thought about emulating sound this way. Maybe they even use something similar, but there’s also all the other noises that a car makes, eg tire and wind noise which they have to take into account.
I guess there might be a sort of middle ground of using a full physical simulation like this program, and using that to work out a series of constants that can be used to change a default engine tone to fit. For example, you might set the noise of the lifters to 20% and boost the bass of the intake noise by 13% etc. etc.
You’re still dynamically creating the engine sound, but not in quite as much detail, so it requires less CPU.
We investigated this when I was working on driving games about 15 years ago, but it wasn’t feasible at the time.
The way to reproduce engine sounds back then was to record sounds from a car at least vaguely similar to the one being modelled, at various RPM, inside and outside the car.
The game engine would then pick samples closest to the target RPM in gameplay, change the playback speeds to match the RPM exactly, and crossfade between them. Tyre and wind noise were also added (as you said), and other environment effects, like echo in a tunnel.
It’s arguable as to whether an exact simulation would give a better gameplay experience, or whether most players would really notice the difference.
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