Formula RaceRoom 90 Coming to R3E Next Update

[Paul Jeffrey]

Sector3 Studios have confirmed their latest open wheel car is coming to the sim - rejoice historic racing fans!

Although the FR90 is a 'fantasy' design, it doesn't take much imagination to make the connection between the FR90 and very early 1990's era Formula One machinery - much to the joy of fans of historic Grand Prix racing.

Coming in three distinct flavours - V8, V10 and V12, the FR90 delivers some incredible audio thanks to the efforts for @anthony monteil and Sector3, as well as producing a very raw and entertaining driving experience behind the wheel.. as anyone who watched Grand Prix racing in the early 1990's would undoubtedly expect from this sort of machine.

Although no exact release date has been given for when this new DLC will drop, Sector3 have confirmed it will be made available alongside the upcoming update - expected to drop for the sim as early as next week.

Stay tuned to the RaceDepartment YouTube and Twitch channel in the coming days for a new 'Talk n Drive' with these awesome cars..


RaceRoom Racing Experience is available exclusively for PC.

Head over to the RaceRoom sub forum here at RaceDepartment for the latest and greatest from the Sector3 Studios developed racing simulation.

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[Aki Korhonen]

I agree with you. Yes, the changing engine sounds being different all throughout the lap, totally alive. This is why I say that there should be a team (or at least 1 guy) dedicated to sound in all racing games. Not just sound samples but the core sound engine itself. With more and more sophisticated sound engines (along with sound-physics connection), we can replicate more and more of all the different sound dynamics happening in real-life and videos like that.

Apart from allll the different noises being emitted from real-life cars, there are also all sorts of further changes to the sound due to the environment such as walls, mountains, buildings, different materials like stone, steel, wood, temperature, humidity, etc.. There are games from the 1990s and even mid-2000s that were focusing on sound engine dynamics through the use of the old EAX 5.0. Sounds would change depending on walls, location, different materials the sound bounces off of, different materials the sound travels through, etc. and that was 15 years ago. There was quite an effort into the sound coding and design for some games instead of graphics like 99.9% of games. This stuff can definitely be done but it just needs the foundation setup (the sound engine itself) in order to be able to run all sorts of dynamics.

Also, closer sound-to-physics connection also gives more complexity and dynamics (ie. liveliness) to the sound.

You don't need to reach ear-drum overload because we all have the power to turn the volume up or down of our speakers just like we can with a youtube video. But even with a real-life video being played at low volume, you can still hear that it sounds, as you say, intense, powerful, alive and complex.

R3E is one of my favorite devs due to R3E's devotion to sound which is probably the best thing about racing besides driving (my opnion). Maybe further looking into the coding of the sound engine to take it to even another level higher can be considered?

What? Project Cars 2 is one of the only sims I currently don't own. Yes, I was part-way through sound-engineering school (only 1 month) and then I had to drop-out due to sudden financial difficulties and other unexpected commitments at the time. If not, I would totally be applying for a job at simracing developers. Besides physics and FFB (and physics "features" like rain, puddles, damage model, drivetrain model, etc.), all I care about in simracing is SOUND. I don't care about graphics, car lineup, circruit lineup, UI, game-modes, etc.)

I'm not in a position to do this for a job at the moment but I feel I can still contribute by trying to explain ideas on how to improve things or explain where and why things sound wrong and what to do to change them so they sound more correct.

i dont have to go to school to know what 90's f1 sounds like. you are just engineer who dont know anything about driving a car or listening a car. really school?ok maybe language barrier damn its sounds wonderful for me. spinelli lets see who got better time or can you drive because you dont like the sounds. volume -

 

[BrunoBæ]

spinelli lets see who got better time or can you drive because you dont like the sounds. volume -

 

[Spinelli]

i dont have to go to school to know what 90's f1 sounds like. you are just engineer who dont know anything about driving a car or listening a car. really school?ok maybe language barrier damn its sounds wonderful for me. spinelli lets see who got better time or can you drive because you dont like the sounds. volume -

I never said you need to go to school to know what an F1 car sounds like. I was replying to your comment when you said I should design my own sounds.

I'm just an engineer who doesn't know any thing about driving? I'm not an engineer and I've raced in anger many different F2000s, F1600, and more. I had the lap-record in a Reynard chassis F2000 series out of about 30 people plus I had the most wins. I was on my way to a $50,000 scholarship for a fully-paid ride and stepping up to higher competition the next season but I lost the championship in the final race due to rain as I barely had any experience in the wet (others had 10+ years).

I've also been simracing for over 15 years. I have top 5 and 10 laptimes in GT Legends in almost every 60s GT and TC car according to GTL Rank. Although I'm not an alien, I've had people online call me that a few times (but I'm not an alien, trust me). I've raced real race car drivers online including AJ Almindinger (ex-Indy driver) in rFactor and had slightly faster laptimes than him although he was more consistent - extremely consistent in fact...he finished 2nd, me 3rd. I also helped with some instructing at a F2000 racing school and some of the drivers I instructed were quite fast up-and-coming karters moving onto cars.

I'm not here to brag or to try and sound like I'm some god-given driver - just pointing out facts in response to you saying I know nothing about driving a car.

Don't go around telling people they don't know anything when you don't know the person and have no idea.

Also, this is about sounds, no need to turn this into a personal attack on me. Don't get soo butthurt because some one criticizes "x" videogame like such a fanboy. We're all here for the same thing, our love of racing (simulated and real). Plus, I wasn't trolling, I took the time to really try and explain things.

Chill out.

 

[Andy_J]

Childish talk. It's just a video game fellas.

 

[Luke Maney]

Childish talk. It's just a video game fellas.

The mind doesn't know it's not real, just saying

 

[BrunoBæ]

there are also all sorts of further changes to the sound due to the environment such as walls, mountains, buildings, different materials like stone, steel, wood, temperature, humidity, etc.. There are games from the 1990s and even mid-2000s that were focusing on sound engine dynamics through the use of the old EAX 5.0. Sounds would change depending on walls, location, different materials the sound bounces off of, different materials the sound travels through, etc. and that was 15 years ago. There was quite an effort into the sound coding and design for some games instead of graphics like 99.9% of games.

OK Spinelli - lets go back to your sound track.
Conserning your comment above about the sound engine and specially about the EAX way of changing the sound in games by creating different sound reflexions then in my book it was a great step back when Creative(EAX) did economically win the battle against the only creative competitor at that time Aureal Interactive with their revolutionary A3D Wavetracing Technology.
I did own a A3D 2.0 soundcard (Diamond Monster MX300) and listening to how the POSITIONAL sound could follow an object in a 3D soundscape quite binaural-ish was something that EAX has never been able to.
Because EAX was not POSITIONAL.

The reason I does mention this is because about one year back I had a conversation with one from iRacings staff about some experimentation they had with a certain full-sphere surround sound format: Ambisonics.
A format that I personally have some experience with by creating a decoder - and a format Codemaster actually uses as the positional sound format in their later racing games.
This can be seen as some kind of comeback of a way more advanced positional sound than what has been heard on PCs or consoles since Creative destroyed 3D sound in games with their EAX sound.

 

[Spinelli]

OK Spinelli - lets go back to your sound track.
Conserning your comment above about the sound engine and specially about the EAX way of changing the sound in games by creating different sound reflexions then in my book it was a great step back when Creative(EAX) did economically win the battle against the only creative competitor at that time Aureal Interactive with their revolutionary A3D Wavetracing Technology.
I did own a A3D 2.0 soundcard (Diamond Monster MX300) and listening to how the POSITIONAL sound could follow an object in a 3D soundscape quite binaural-ish was something that EAX has never been able to.
Because EAX was not POSITIONAL.

Ya, totally. I heard that Aureal 3D was even superior to EAX. Isn't crazy that these amazing sound technologies are from the 1990s and earl 2000s? Imagine even half the time, effort, and money spent on graphics was spent for sound in the videogame industry.

EAX killed the competition which was sad but then Microsoft, with Windows Vista, effectively killed EAX and any and all hardware processing sound as they removed the hardware sound layer itself from Windows Vista. I wasn't implying EAX is superior to A3D, I was just using EAX as an example of how complex sound design can be since it models things like the following:

• Environmental Effect Presets
• Per-channel individual environmental presets
• Hardware DSP rendering
• Occlusion Effects
• Material-specific reverb parameters
• 'Smoothing' between 3D audio environments
• Environmental Panning
• New reverb engine (new as of EAX 3.0)
• Multiple simultaneous environments
• Flanger
• Echo (not the same as reverb)
• Distortion (many different types of distortion - fascinating)
• Ring modulation effects
• Obstruction
• Surface reflectivity
  
• Exclusion
  
• 128 simultaneous voices, up to 4 effects on each (as of EAX 5.0)
• EAX PurePath (EAX Sound effects can originate from one speaker only)
• Environment FlexiFX (four available effects slots per channel)
• EAX MacroFX (realistic positional effects at close range)
• Environment Occlusion (sound from adjacent environments can pass through walls)

In EAX 4.0, just reverb alone has 24 different paramaters, some of these are:

• The energy in the Reflections and Reverb sections at mid frequencies
• The Reflections Delay and the Reverb Delay
• The Reflections Pan and Reverb Pan vectors, for spatial/directional distribution
• The “Room filter,” which affects the Reflections and the Reverb identically and allows correcting their energy at low and high frequencies
• The Decay Time at low, mid and high
• The reference low and high frequencies
• The Diffusion of the reverberation
• The Echo and Modulation parameters, which affect the late reverberation.

"In total, the reverb effect exposes 24 different parameters. This includes low-level properties, and high level controls, which adjust a subset of low-level properties."

EAX 4.0 Introduction: https://github.com/kxproject/kX-Audio-driver-Documentation/raw/master/3rd Party Docs/EAX/EAX 4.0 Introduction (2003).pdf

EAX 4.0 Sound Designer's Guide: https://github.com/kxproject/kX-Audio-driver-Documentation/raw/master/3rd Party Docs/EAX/EAX 4.0 Sound Designer's Guide (2003).pdf

EAX 4.0 Programmer's Guide: https://github.com/kxproject/kX-Audio-driver-Documentation/raw/master/3rd Party Docs/EAX/EAX 4.0 Programmer's Guide (2003).pdf

The Sound Designer's Guide is very interesting as it explains all sorts of effects and such. People who think sound design is simple and it's just a matter of recording car sounds and playing with samples are super, super drastically over-simplifying sound design.

Back to Creative VS Areal:
Creative sued Aureal which I think made them go bankrupt and I just read that Creative also threatened John Carmack ("father" of FPS, created Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, etc.) because John was thinking of using his own 3D audio API.

"One of the advantages of Aureal 3D over EAX in the early days was that A3D did real-time wave-tracing and audio occlusion while EAX was just basically a bunch of fancy reverb effects. However, the later versions of EAX started including occlusion and other enhancements similar to A3d however EAX isn't quite there yet." It sounds like with EAX 4.0 and 5.0, they got closer to A3D but even 5 years after Aureal went bankrupt, EAX never reached Aureal's level.

I hope devs really put more effort into sound engines.

...about one year back I had a conversation with one from iRacings staff about some experimentation they had with a certain full-sphere surround sound format: Ambisonics.
A format that I personally have some experience with...

Sounds great. Nice to know other devs are looking into further sound engine evolution.

 

[Kenny Paton]

With the processing power of CPUs today - even a single CPU thread compared to 20 years ago, let alone all the threads available - why aren't gamemakers doing stuff like what A3D and EAX did 20 years ago?

I would suspect that it just isn't worth their effort, let's face it the subtle nuances of sound will not matter one jot to the vast bulk of gamers as most games approach is pretty close as to make very little difference.
I'm not implying it's not important just maybe not near the top of a developers check list.
In RaceRoom I think we're lucky that Anthony takes such care.

 

[BrunoBæ]

@Spinelli
The main reason I mentioned Aureal was because their A3D Wavetracing Technology was based on POSITIONAL sound tracing - quite similiar to the ray tracing recently introduced in (nVidia) graphic cards.
Because when EAX as just a sound effect extension of Microsofts DirectSound3D then EAX itself have no positional impact on the sound cues.
But what makes the dead of Aureal so much more sad is that now after about 20 years it looks like the wheel is about to be re-invented by AMD/Sonys socalled 360 Reality Audio to be used in PS5.
Hopefully there will be some spinoff of this exciting positional 3D sound system to the PC platform.

@kenny
Im not so pessimistic conserning the impact a working 3D sound solution can do to raise a certain game against the competition - hehe eventhough a lot of gamers only use some cheap headsets.
Just check how often as example Raceroom is mentioned quite positive exactly because of its sound quality.

And another relevant thing in this sound discussion is that one of the absolute urgent features in a working VR system is that the sound cues does follow the 3D display in a similiar low latency 3D soundscape.

 

[Kenny Paton]

another relevant thing in this sound discussion is that one of the absolute urgent features in a working VR system is that the sound cues does follow the 3D display in a similiar low latency 3D soundscape

Not arguing that, atm it's all still pretty niche, in fact a niche within a niche, no doubt as it becomes more mainstream it may get some extra attention from the devs.
I'm not decrying the value of sound by any means. I love my hifi.