Gran Turismo 4, he's working on a mod for the game that revamps a bunch of stuff, and he also redid a ton of engine sounds. It's still WIP though.
Appreciate it, GT4 and Beam both fall into the very small circle of "games where I can make code/gameplay changes and improve the sounds", so tweaking them has been pretty enjoyable to say the least. GT is tough to work with in the sound department though - if you consider that it's made for PS2 hardware and seems to run out of sound memory if a sound is bigger than just 70KB or so - making good sounds that don't break the game definitely isn't easy. Comparatively Beam is almost drag and drop, especially since I made myself a little tool to automatically generate the blends JSON file from a folder of RPM samples. Helps that I already had such a big library of sound rips that I've amassed from modding GT, too. As for the workload, don't worry about it. I'm a bit one-track when it comes to modding games, you might notice a lack of progress on GT4 purely because when I get tired of working on one thing, I move to another. What I'm doing for Beam is way smaller in scope so I can't imagine it'll be brewing for years like my GT4 work.
Yeah, when it comes to stuff myself, I always like the smaller details in things, you know? Like there's a lot of things that probably 90% of people either aren't going to notice or simply don't care about, but when you see the attention in that department you can't help but appreciate it. Makes me glad that people like Ange are making things like an Engine Simulator. It's far from perfect but it's damn impressive in the way it works and the sounds you can achieve with it. In terms of the PS2 thing, I didn't know that, and I can definitely see how that can cause some problems. Sometimes I'll replace sounds in random games I play, depending on how easy it is to do, and I'll sometimes wonder why something doesn't work. Like for example, a sound won't play and it's silent for some reason, only to realize I have to make my replaced sound have the same bit rate, or mix it down to mono, or sometimes I might even have to make the duration of the sound match the original. Can be annoying at times. I'm the same way when it comes to working on projects. As a musician I often get writer's block and I keep making new projects while essentially neglecting old ones. Only once in a while I might go back to an older project and try working on it again, but that's where my problems lie, as that's the part I struggle the most in. Hell, I've still got FL Studio project files that were last modified in 2019, and I can barely still figure out what I want to do with some of them. So I definitely applaud you for being better at that sort of thing than I am.
I think the obsession with audio stuff like this is definitely a musician thing. I'm not exactly one myself but I'm definitely into listening to details in songs, hearing people dissect them, listening to multitracks and remixing bits etc. You definitely reach a point where you just have "an ear" for certain things that you can't really quantify or describe, but projects like this to me are purely just tweaking things until they sound right.
I do music intuitively. I've always done things by ear. I can't read sheet music or anything like that. The fact I've managed to get by just by listening is I guess a feat in its own way, but that might also be because of my autism.
Yeah, I'm like that too, people even talk about being audiophiles when it comes to music and details regarding sounds. That's why I also make Mods for the OGs NFSs, that fix wrong sounds, as I love cars and I also consider myself an audiophile, if something doesn't please me it really bothers me, especially in car games where the sounds are wrong or very bad, like GT4 or some NFS where such car have a V12 engine but sounds like a V8, or have a i4 and sounds like a V6 and etc
i relate to this, especially when it happens in movies and stuff when big dirty american V8s are dubbed over pretty much any car lmao
Hell yeah, sounds like a good ol' bmw I6. Also, i may or may not have found the sample you used (wanted to compare to real life myself) --- Post updated --- Video link. The sound is the 3.0 etk i6 (starts at about 17 seconds into the video) --- Post updated --- Also sped up a bit for obvious reasons (which are that the etk accelerates faster)
Sounds similar but not quite, the exhaust sound I used for the 3.0 was an old Japanese inline 6, possibly the one from the Toyota 2000GT, mixed with the engine of an older M6 race car. Both of them combined sounded a lot like the more powerful BMW E24 variants so I felt it suited the ETK.
Decided to educate myself a bit more on Beam's Lua systems and ended up with a sort of scriptable VTEC/VVT setup. I've set it up to where you can specify which soundConfig and soundConfigExhaust EQ parameters should be tweaked on a given engine at a given RPM, so in this case applying a bit of lower EQ and main gain boost to the engine source gives a bit of a VTEC effect.
The gist of it is: - Config JSON file stores EQ tweaks under internal engine names such as covet_engine_dohc or pickup_engine_v8_4.5, with a changeRpm parameter for when to apply them - My script resides in the lua\vehicle\extensions\auto space so that it's automatically run on every vehicle and doesn't have to be manually added - The script traverses the GE and vehicle lua, gets the car's engine name and stock audio EQ as soon as it initialises, and checks if it exists as a key in the config data - If it does exist, code runs in updateGFX to check the current RPM from the electrics code, and if it crosses over changeRpm it applies them, otherwise reverts to stock Once it's more finalised and released in some form I don't mind people poking around to see how it's done.
i see, i know many people implementing VVTi and lore friendly VTEC engines into their mods would prefer to use this rather than the work arounds they have come up with.
I started looking into custom BOV sounds and noticed that any non-FMOD files seem to loop constantly when they start playing. I presume the devs' FMOD BOV audio has some kind of play-once metadata attached that we can't replicate with loose files. I saw on the forum that existing workarounds seemed to be to just make your BOV sound 10+ minutes long so that it never replays, but I thought this was a hilariously messy workaround as it massively bloats the file sizes of any mods that use them. I looked into the turbocharger code and noticed that every BOV sound is also set to play as a looping sample, AudioDefaultLoop3D. Not sure if it's an oversight or what, but changing this to AudioDefault3D in my own version has fixed the issue for custom BOVs with no adverse effects on the vanilla ones, so here's a clip of some custom BOVs on the ETK V8 - a nice little 184KB sample that only plays once. I've only noticed one issue so far and I'm not sure if it's related, but when loading from a loose file it seems that the sound plays from the center of the car, so it's quiet on the bonnet camera and loud + unmuffled on the interior camera. I think I'll still release the loop fix as even if I never fix this issue it's still less annoying than the original one.
