So I did some digging yesterday to find some information on sound modding for gmotor2, and found a useful starter's guide on the HistorX forum from 2010 (which has somehow still survived, thank goodness). Note that for GTR2, I believe the .aud file it the equivalent of the .sfx file in rF – otherwise, the information should carry over directly from one sim to another (and probably to GSC and AMS as well). Big thank you to Rantam, the author of the post. I've copied it below to preserve it for the future, and so others on RD might find it.
Hi there, some of you have asked some information about how to create engine sounds for rFactor. I have to admit I'm not an expert creating engine sou
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Hi there,
some of you have asked some information about how to create engine sounds for rFactor. I have to admit I'm not an expert creating engine sounds, but did some before we got the huge talent of Wolferl with us, so here are some tips to start:
- Chose a car already done which has sounds you like.
- Go to the folder where this car is stored in the mod (usually Gamedata/vehicles/historic gt/historical fia gt/...)
- Open the .sfx file of this car. On this file you'll find all the information related to the sounds of the car (samples used and their location in the file structure, different parameters, etc). There are other files which are important for sounds (engine, for example), but that .sfx is where you should take a look to start.
- Summarizing, there're 3 kind of sounds defined in that file:
a) engine sound for outside view
b) engine for cockpit view
c) sound effects (surfaces, crashes, horn, etc).
For a) and b) there're two sounds subgroups:
- power (when you're pressing the throttle)
- coast (when you release the throttle)
Being the reason that the engine sounds different on these situations.
If you go to the folder where the samples are stored (you can see the path in the .sfx file) you can listen these samples to have a better understanding of what i mean.
- Probably you've already noticed that rF generates the full RPM range of the engine just using 4-5 samples recorded at different RPMs.
- The samples are in .wav format. Take a look to the properties of the sounds (bit rate, etc) so you know how to save them once you create your own ones.
Now that you've seen how the sounds are defined in rF is time for you to do your own ones:
- First, you need an audio editor to create/edit the samples. Audacity is a good option for starters: is free (opensource), not very complex, but powerful enough for this task.
- Then you need samples to create your own engine sound. You can get these samples recording them by yourself, or if you don't have such option using the ones you may find in different resources (documentaries, YouTube, etc). We'll use this last option as example, as in most of cases you won't have access to the original car to do the recording on your own.
- Go to YouTube/Vimeo and search videos of the car. Remember you have to create sounds for both cockpit and external sounds, and for the two kind of subgroups: power and coast. So, these are 4 group of samples in total. That means you may need to find different videos to cover all of them. Anyway, let's focus just on power sounds recorded from cockpit.
- Try to search long recordings where all the RPM range is used. Much better if the engine is kept at the same RPMs for some time at some moments.
- Once you've got the audio track of the video (you can convert the video's sound to .wav or other sound format using free applications you'll find on the Net, just google them) then you have to 'extract' different samples from it, each one of them recorded at constant RPMs, so you can 'rebuild' the full RPM range. For example: Idle, 2000rpm, 4000 rpm, 6000 rpm and limiter (this is just an example, depending on the engine, the recording you got, etc. you may need or would be forced to use sounds recorded at different RPMs, a higher/lower number of samples, etc).
- Is important that every sample stores the engine at constant RPMs, because they will be used to create loops. Imagine you're running the car in rFactor and you are at 2000rpm steadily. In this case rF would use a sample as a loop, playing it again and again until you increase or reduce the RPMs. If the sample wouldn't contain a sound of the engine at constant speed you would notice easily that what you're hearing in game is a sample played once and again. In the other hand, if it contains the engine recorded at constant speed then it will be much more difficult to know that's just a loop. The longer the sample is the better the result is also (in most of cases): if the sample is just 1 second you would hear it 60 times if you drive at constant rpms during a minute. But if the player contains 10 seconds of recording then you'd only hear it 6 times, which would reduce the 'loop' effect.
- The last step would be to define the transitions between the samples so the engine sounds on a credible way when you press or lift the throttle. You have to do that in the .sfx file, where the mix(transition) parameters for each sample are defined. It looks something like this:
EngineRPMcoastInside=2
{
MinimumRPM=3900.00 // must overlap properly
MaximumRPM=5900.00 // must overlap properly
NaturalRPM=7500.00 // engine RPM at which sample was recorded
}
Basically there you define when a sample fades in when it fades out. As this is defined for each sample in the end what you're doing is generating the transitions, where two samples are being mixed/overlapped (one is fading in while the other is fading out). Let me illustrate it with the following image:
Well, there're more things in that .sfx than the explained here, but this was just an introduction for those of you who want to start doing sounds for rFactor (most of this is also applicable for other gMotor2 games and almost to every sim out there).
Any correction or comment just let me know. As i said I'm not a guru of sounds so I might be mistaken in some of the things i wrote.
Anyway, hope you found it interesting
)
