RaceRoom Racing Experience | Significant Sound Improvements Headline New Update

Paul Jeffrey · Aug 26, 2020

Sector3 Studios have today dropped a new update for their RaceRoom Racing Experience simulation - adding plenty of new improvements as well as adding the LADA Vesta to the growing list of free content.

Lada Vesta touring car now available as free content.
Significant sound improvements across the game.
Various AI fixes and art updates.

A new and substantial update has been released for RaceRoom Racing Experience today. Weighing in at no less than 5.7GB, the update contains a mix of both content and quality of life improvements to the simulation - the undisputed headline of which has to be yet more improvements to the already outstanding audio within the title. Yes, the racing game with arguably the best audio experience in the business has somehow been improved even further - with Sector3 having added various new effects and samples to R3E in what should be a nice step up in immersion for players to experience when out on track.

Although this is a sizeable update and we alluded to new content at the start of the article, that content isn't quite in a playable yet. This update has added the 2020 specification DTM cars from Audi and BMW, however these are still being worked on by the Studio and will only immediately be available in competitions, with single player content DLC release expected later in the year.

Other highlights from the new build include various art passes to update select tracks within the title, AI improvements at some tracks and more minor tweaks and adjustments across the game.

You can check out the full update notes from Sector3 Studios below:

RaceRoom Update Notes (26.08.20)

Lada Vesta is now free to play with 2 liveries, playable against WTCR car classes.
Prepared content for upcoming DTM 2020 competitions
Sounds - Cockpit cameras now feature backfire samples specific to the interior of the car, bringing extra life and vibrance.
Sounds - New lot of samples for backfires and made their patterns richer. Amount of backfire is car dependant and much more diverse than before.
Sounds - Brake disk whine samples volume is now affected by the brake disk temperature. New recordings of brake whines for GT cars.
Sounds - New fuel pumps samples
Sounds - New gravel sound samples.
Sounds - Porsche 911 GT3 Cup - New sound recordings
Drag Reduction System and Push to Pass are now split in two unique control bindings
Added a key binding for FFB Multiplier, allowing to adjust this setting from inside the car.
Moved some old HUD overlays to the butterHUD system (Traction Control, Brake Bias)
Disabled the in-game screenshot capture system, as it caused conflicts with and was inferior in quality to Steam’s own screenshot capturing. Visit your Steam client settings menu to bind a key and select a folder for your screenshots.
Changed so the graphics_options.xml located in your Documents folder now contains variable names, making it easier to edit some settings through notepad.
Dedicated server - Scheduler - Improvements to handling of different time zones between browser and host machine
AI - Porsche 911 GT3 Cup + Sprint - Tweaks to improve their handling of slow turns
AI - DEKRA Lausitzring - Fixed AI braking later than the pit lane entrance gate.
AI - Dubai - Fixed some broken waypoint that was causing AI’s to stop driving
AI - Nordschleife - Calmed down some AI’s around the Adenauer forest.
Art - DEKRA Lausitzring - Fixed the sudden disappearance of certain track objects while sitting in the gravel in turns 8 and 10.
Art - Sachsenring - Updates to bring it to 2020 visuals.
Art - Spa-Francorchamps - Updates to bring it to 2020 visuals
Renamed Mazda Laguna Seca into Weathertech Raceway Laguna Seca.

RaceRoom Racing Experience is available now, available exclusively on PC.

Want to get the most from the sim? Head over to the RaceRoom Racing Experience sub forum here at RaceDepartment and start up a new thread - get involved with the community today!

Shovas · Aug 28, 2020

Dethrone1427 said:
In particular Reiza games have vacuum sounding cars. So irritating as other parts of their games are done so well. Just the engine stuff is so thin, and tinny sounding with zero depth to them. AMS 1 I was able to replace them with better comminunity produced material, with AMS2 no such luck.

Audio must be tough and my guess is they spend their money on the bling, first. iRacing is atrocious for audio.

I suspect SimBin/S3 got lucky back in the day with a brilliant audio engineer and kept him. I've always been impressed with their audio. Even GTR2 has the beginnings of great audio.

S3 has put out developer diary style videos of their audio engineer before, back when they introduced back-fire as I recall.

UMC 22 · Aug 28, 2020

Andrew_WOT said:
So what speaker configuration is recommended for VR headset? Headphones or something else? Technically they are headphones but the VR audio driver does 3D spatial positioning, so not sure really.
Seems like I had good results with both headphones and Dolby Surround.

I've always used the headphone setting in all games that have it with my Oculus devices. I feel that if VR audio was meant to be set to a surround sound setting, it would be a more common discussion. But who knows? Maybe I've just missed it along the way.

amsterDAN · Aug 28, 2020

Dethrone1427 said:
In particular Reiza games have vacuum sounding cars. So irritating as other parts of their games are done so well. Just the engine stuff is so thin, and tinny sounding with zero depth to them. AMS 1 I was able to replace them with better comminunity produced material, with AMS2 no such luck.

I agree, last night I played two or three hours of RaceRoom, then tried to switch over to AMS 2 and I immediately ripped my headphones off in disgust, exited the game, and simply booted RaceRoom up again and jumped right back in to this glorious sea of sound.

Deleted member 197115 · Aug 28, 2020

Goffik said:
I've always used the headphone setting in all games that have it with my Oculus devices. I feel that if VR audio was meant to be set to a surround sound setting, it would be a more common discussion. But who knows? Maybe I've just missed it along the way.

May be it's more controversial for WMR as it's forcing Spatial Windows Sonic for Headphones for VR headset.

Boby Kim · Aug 28, 2020

Better would be a sigbificant ffb update

RLEE01 · Aug 29, 2020

Amazing sound

I love it

Kurupt CDN · Aug 29, 2020

Andrew_WOT said:
Seems like I was able to fix the delay.
Deleted Documents\My Games\SimBin\RaceRoom Racing Experience\UserData\audio_options.xml"
and chose Dolby Surround as audio output option, not sure if this is the right speaker configuration for WMR with Windows Sonic for Headphones enabled, but it sounds awesome.
What is recommended preset for VR anyway, headphones?

Disregard...misread your post and thought I ready Dolby Atmos when you said Dolby surround

Deleted member 197115 · Aug 29, 2020

Both Headphones and Dolby Surround presets are in sync now, haven't tried others.

Olijke Poffer · Aug 29, 2020

Desmolad said:
It does work! I recently booted it up after a long break and couldnt get the tilt to work and had forgotten where the settings were. when you go into the edit assignments or whatever it is, where you get to bind keys to controls, its right down the bottom! its not in the normal section where you get to move the seat forward/back/up/down. at the bottom is a special list just for triple screens.

No that is not a tilt seat function. That is a shift up or down function. the whole screen goes up or down.

Deleted member 197115 · Aug 30, 2020

Andrew_WOT said:
So what speaker configuration is recommended for VR headset? Headphones or something else? Technically they are headphones but the VR audio driver does 3D spatial positioning, so not sure really.
Seems like I had good results with both headphones and Dolby Surround.

After some testing seems like for VR Headphones preset sounds the fullest with the best dynamic range.
World class sound immersion, outstanding job S3.

Alex72 · Aug 30, 2020

Dethrone1427 said:
In particular Reiza games have vacuum sounding cars. So irritating as other parts of their games are done so well. Just the engine stuff is so thin, and tinny sounding with zero depth to them. AMS 1 I was able to replace them with better comminunity produced material, with AMS2 no such luck.

Niels Heusinkveld talked about engine sounds in one of his videos not long ago. LFS had some software sound engine creating the engine sounds and they arent actually THAT bad given the software was written a long time ago and utilizing very little CPU power. Today with multiple cores if someone(s) could program a sound engine that is geared towards car engine sounds you could probably get really good sounds with no sampling weird effects going up and down in RPM. No need to find sounds samples to fit every step of the RPM because its being calculated on its own. I dont know how well that would work but Niels usually know what he's talking about.

It's weird though because sounds are one very important part to the immersion in any entertainment and when it comes to sims at least it is lacking a bit. You all know what it race cars sounds like in real life. Its an experience in itself. But i realize its hard to replicate. Would think some geniuses somewhere out there by now would have come up with a sound engine geared towards motor engines and sell the crap out of it to racing games and sims.

Emery · Sep 1, 2020

Finally got all 8 GB downloaded (think that may have been 2 updates?) and played with. Backfire sound in the car does, indeed, make use of the subwoofer now. The gravel trap sounds... meh. Couldn't tell a thing about the brake discs' sound. Overall, yes, a little richer sound, but not game-changing to me.

UMC 22 · Sep 1, 2020

Emery said:
Couldn't tell a thing about the brake discs' sound.

You can hear it in some cars better than others. Can barely hear it in the DTM 2020 because the engine is too loud (as you'd expect), but can easily hear it in WTCRs and even in the FR US at low revs. I didn't notice much with the gravel sound either, but perhaps that's because I don't spend much time in the traps and therefore can't remember what it sounded like before.

tritonion · Sep 3, 2020

Boby Kim said:
Better would be a sigbificant ffb update

The FFB is actually amazing after the recent physics updates for most of the cars, but you have to ensure a few things:

Use a car class with updated physics, classes with the old physics (such as DTM13-16, older WTCC etc.) have significantly less detailed FFB. The easiest way to tell if a class has the current physics is to check if you are able to change the tire pressure in the setup menu.
Reset your controller profile to the default. If you don't use some rare and obscure DIY DD wheel there's a good chance that there is a good default profile available where you don't really need to change anything. Default profiles are updated regularly, so make sure to use the current default.
Using an old FFB profile with the updated physics will mess up FFB. Especially don't use any FFB tutorials or settings provided before December 2019 as those were made for the old physics.

bgil66 · Sep 3, 2020

tritonion said:
The FFB is actually amazing after the recent physics updates for most of the cars, but you have to ensure a few things:

Use a car class with updated physics, classes with the old physics (such as DTM13-16, older WTCC etc.) have significantly less detailed FFB. The easiest way to tell if a class has the current physics is to check if you are able to change the tire pressure in the setup menu.

Reset your controller profile to the default. If you don't use some rare and obscure DIY DD wheel there's a good chance that there is a good default profile available where you don't really need to change anything. Default profiles are updated regularly, so make sure to use the current default.

Using an old FFB profile with the updated physics will mess up FFB. Especially don't use any FFB tutorials or settings provided before December 2019 as those were made for the old physics.

thanks for this info, I was in the DTM '16 and was thinking well they feel weird I thought it was new physics