Hello Dovetail, please patch your terrible sound problems on the Series X. This is unreasonable and just embarrassing. This is permanent on the new London route, are you testing your games on the xbox?? Best regards
Hi Stefan the sound issues are within the unreal engine and affect all routes work is ongoing to look at and fix but this is long term as is a big job but DTG are looking at it
One does wonder why DTG chose to implement their sounds in a different way to how literally every other developer using UE4 who don't have these problems do it.
Most other developers don't have the challenge of needing to loop lengthy samples in order to provide continuous and accurate background sound, though; my understanding is that the solution used by DTG to do this is suboptimal and hence the problem. To be honest I find the sound issues infinitely more immersion breaking and tiresome than the texture glitches, but I'm resigned to them not being addressed any time soon unfortunately.
Pretty sure several racing games using accurate recordings of licensed cars do though, hence suspecting that however they do it would be the optimal go-to for anyone doing likewise.
They are using middleware like FMOD or WWISE to not have those problems. Unfortunately such a solution is way to expensive for a train simulator like TSW is. Each DLC needs own licencing for the middleware then. That becomes massively expensive and would raise the prices or would basically prevent doing DLC at all. A multi-hundred-million-dollar-game can do it, a train sim not.
I mean, I'm personally used to mixing and cycling industrial sounds by hand when putting together musical compositions I need those samples for, so I was surprised to see that professionals in an actual field developing stuff that use them have problems. You isolate each individual sound from the recording and create loops of them all, then layer them to get back the original sound, with trigger points allowing for fading any one out and others in as needed depending on which components of the machine are operating under a given circumstance, right? I've done game modding that did this just fine. But yes, I have also worked on modding projects that had the awful microphone pop at the start and end of some recordings because whoever was working on the sound didn't clean those recordings up.
In theory, yes, in practice, not often. Getting usable source recordings from trains is a own story at all. As a developer i can be happy if i have any recording of most trains, what is often bad bad quality, but better than nothing. Doing loops out of a second of usable "flesh" of sound is not always possible without having audible loops or passing over to the synthetically sounding area when you try to use granualr synthesis where you can basically stop the playback of the sample to loop it. I tried this all over the years. Sometimes it works nice, sometimes not. As a dev for train sims you often has no other choice to use what you have or simply do nothing (means, discard making any loco or whatever what then ends up in not having any content for train sims). We need to do and live with compromises in that genre. Period. If you could do this technique, yes, it can work well. A thing that is doable with FMOD (because it works like a DAW in-game). But withe the tools we have for TSW (basically in-engine sound of UE4 with limited channel count of 16 for a loco), it is absolutely not doable at all. You may ask where the limit comes from? One word: consoles. But making DLC version for each platform is also a no go for this train sim genre. So we have to stick with the lowest end platform to have our development goals (memory budget, audio channel budget, disk space budget, mesh size .... and so on). It is a train sim, nit Forza or any other AAA title. PS: I know it comes in mind to say "ATS/ETS2 uses FMOD too". Yes, the do, and they have way more customers than a train sim can have. And they dont have the problem of so much different DLC to pay licences to the middleware company. If they would have 1 or 2 DLC per months, and less customers, they would also not be able to use FMOD. Remember, they don't used it al long time before. It is relatively new to their game, possibly after gathering enough money to do so.
It's interesting because I've seen incredibly impressive recreations of sounds from scratch where this kind of good quality recording isn't possible, and I'd rate it on the same level as the artists who perfectly repaint mattes from scratch in order to make high def "remasters" of films that have had no official HD release. I do wonder if they have anyone on the team who could recreate the sounds by ear. I expect there are definitely people out there with the right skills and an ear for these very specific sounds, and they might gravitate to work like this, but whether DTG have any on staff is the question.
I tried a lot of recreating such sounds. I used lots of different granular synthesises over the time to get loop out of bad sources. I am working with synthesizers and audio since over 20 years. I know what is possible and what not. Ok, today there is a lot more possible than the days back. But it is massively time consuming and therefor massively expensive to hire such capable people. Nothing you could do for a train sim i would say. Audio is only a tiny part of the whole process of doing a train or route for a TS. You can't spend 50% or more of your budget to only getting audio in place. A painful through of course. I would love to spend 3 months into audio for a train. But i maybe have only one or two weeks for such work, not more. And the limiting capabilities of UE4s audio engine are the other part of obstacles in your way to good audio in TSW. No idea if this ever can be way better than it is. I, as one who knows what it means to develop trains and routes for a TS, i would say not really. This is a problem since i am on that kind of stuff. Lots of decisions, if you make a train or not, are laying down to having any audio for it available. You can't simply go and record a train as you want. Especially not here in Germany for example. It needs lots of vitamin B to get any of that stuff. Or simply ride a train and record it this way, what is often not really helpful. People generally think of it as an easy job to do to make the audio better in a train sim. It is way harder and way more expensive than you can think of. But a TS is a niche game genre. There are not lots of spare money to spend into massively audio engineering tasks. There is a lot going on already to do better audio in TSW, but the possibilities are limited. No matter what people may say or think from outside the development bubble. PS: i'm not speaking for DTG, i'm speaking of my experiences from over 10 years of making TS content. Just in case someone wants to bring the discussion on the usual DTG bashing way
The sounds are actually an Xbox issue because PS doesn't have the looping issue. DTG decided to use an old Xbox sound system and it's never worked on TSW since it came to console but they keep using it anyway
