Realistic sound? (physically)

Are there any source ports that implement physically realistic sounds?

By the term "physically" I mean by the fact that light is faster than the speed of sound.
I'm just interested how that'll turn out.

I'm not sure I know what you mean. Light may be faster than the speed of sound but nothing in doom has a comparable speed. How will you measure to check if its working?

Not to my knowledge. It would also be kind of pointless since you can't even hear things that are far enough away for sound delay to be noticeable.

What would be interesting would be to implement a physical model of sound reflections / reverberations, a la http://www.roadtovr.com/nvidias-vrworks-audio-brings-physically-based-3d-gpu-accelerated-sound/

Something like Thief 1/2's audio system would be interesting for sure.

At first I thought the OP would be discussing something similar to Cybershade's sound occlusion system but whaaaa

Jaxxoon R said:

At first I thought the OP would be discussing something similar to Cybershade's sound occlusion system but whaaaa

That would make way too much sense :D

joe-ilya said:

Are there any source ports that implement physically realistic sounds?

By the term "physically" I mean by the fact that light is faster than the speed of sound.
I'm just interested how that'll turn out.

Do you mean the Doppler effect, where, for example, the sound of a car decreases in pitch after it speeds past you? That could be cool and noticeable in a few cases.

That would turn out weird. Filtering the high frequencies when the sound comes through walls / doors would be a nice idea, though.

kb1 said:

Do you mean the Doppler effect, where, for example, the sound of a car decreases in pitch after it speeds past you? That could be cool and noticeable in a few cases.

I once tried to implement this in Mocha Doom, but at least by using the built-in pitch-shifting (actually, sample-skipping) tables, the stepping in frequency is too coarse: most sounds ended up sounding comically exaggerated and/or like being stoned. This really needs a much more powerful (and CPU-intensive) sound processing engine to do right. Probably more complex that Doom's renderer iself.

Now I want to know what game has the most realistic sound. I've heard there are some games that can be actually played quite normally by blind people because sound is enough to understand what's going on.

Memfis said:

Now I want to know what game has the most realistic sound. I've heard there are some games that can be actually played quite normally by blind people because sound is enough to understand what's going on.

In the old Thief games the sound plays a very important role. Both for you detecting the enemies and for the enemies detecting you.

To the point where you have to manage how fast you are walking, firing moss arrow between two pieces of carpet so you don't step on stone etc.

So check out Thief Gold.

VGA said:

So check out Thief Gold.

To add onto that suggestion, get TFix. Adds widescreen support, fixes bugs, etc. Has optional HD assets but you can easily choose not to install them.

Linguica said:

What would be interesting would be to implement a physical model of sound reflections / reverberations, a la http://www.roadtovr.com/nvidias-vrworks-audio-brings-physically-based-3d-gpu-accelerated-sound/

I'd also like to see this, this demo I saw a while back shows what's theoretically possible:

relevant:

Bad Company 2 was the first game to ever blow me away with its sound design, and I've wanted to see better sound in games ever since then. I would even be willing to see graphics take a hit for more realistic sound simulation. It can add a lot of character to how a game presents itself IMO.

kb1 said:

Do you mean the Doppler effect, where, for example, the sound of a car decreases in pitch after it speeds past you? That could be cool and noticeable in a few cases.

ZDoom has this due to using a real 3D sound engine. But the effect had to be toned down basically to zero because it doesn't sound right most of the time.

The player movement is just too fast for 'realistic' sound to work correctly.

joe-ilya said:

Are there any source ports that implement physically realistic sounds?

By the term "physically" I mean by the fact that light is faster than the speed of sound.
I'm just interested how that'll turn out.

Speed of light c = 299 792 458 m/s.
Next.

Speed of sound 340 m/s. If you had one kilometer sector the sound should reach you like in ~3s. No idea how big maps there are out there. Probably hard to do and no one would notice anyway.

The only realism you need is power of sound fading out with distance.

Filystyn said:

Speed of light c = 299 792 458 m/s.
Next.

Speed of sound 340 m/s. If you had one kilometer sector the sound should reach you like in ~3s. No idea how big maps there are out there. Probably hard to do and no one would notice anyway.

The only realism you need is power of sound fading out with distance.

For something moving away from you at a fast rate (or you moving away from it), you could slow the sound down a bit. Thing is, in Doom, there's not too many things that play their sound long enough, while they're whizzing by you, so it would be rare to hear such a thing. Could be done fairly easily, though. A much better effect would be stereo echo, where sound bounces off a closer wall sooner than it would on a further wall. Also would depend on the surface the sound is hitting, and the geometry of the room in general. KBDoom has an effect that fakes it a bit. It's kinda nice, but not real noticeable. I purposely minimized it, due to the inability to properly detect surfaces based on textures, and my general laziness to do better. Improvement is planned, however.

It just bothers me that when a rocket from faraway explodes and you don't hear it at all.

joe-ilya said:

It just bothers me that when a rocket from faraway explodes and you don't hear it at all.

You can set this with decorate. normally sounds are heard max on ~1400 or something. For rockets i set this to 8k and have much better effect.

Linguica said:

Not to my knowledge. It would also be kind of pointless since you can't even hear things that are far enough away for sound delay to be noticeable.

NOT REALLY TRUE. In vanilla Doom, at the eighth level (boss level in Doom 1), you can hear all the sounds, they never fade off to silence. Most ports removed that (presumably because the original code was lost with DMX) but if they added it back (usually already there via MAPINFO), a delayed sound would make a lot of sense in maps like E2M8 or E3M8.

I'm tempted to experiment with it in a modified Eternity some day.

Doom's sound distance metric uses the same approximate distance function used for range checks -and thus buggy/periodically repeating every 14K units in all directions, (except height, where it's constant) so sound in Doom is more like a 2D stationary wave in a big box - with a primary peak centered on the source and many secondary peak fronts/contours scattered around the map, following an anomalous and non-Euclidean periodic envelope profile. This can lead to very confusing situations, like e.g. hearing the annoying grinding of a crusher placed half a map away just as if it was in the same room.

The vanilla sound engine also messes up things like simple L/R positioning, to the point that using it purely to be aware of your surroundings would be suicidal. Essentially, sound is every bit as fucked up as the visuals -only cruder/plainer. If you consider Doom's visuals realistic...

Now, since Doom takes place on alien worlds with a very thin atmosphere, sound propagation should actually be slower than on Earth, and much more dampened. But as already mentioned, since Doomguy moves at about the same pace as a car, realistic sound would be like hearing people yelling at you through closed windows on a speeding vehicle.

The sound that annoys me most is hearing monsters through solid rock and void space.
Have to put a monster pen near the edge of the map to limit this, and many PWAD do not do that.

I know that monsters hearing the player is governed by the sound block line.
Has any port tried to limit the player hearing the monsters with a similar
method and distance.

I use the crusher sound to make mechanical noises for industrial areas.
Most PWAD are too quiet with no machinery running.
Need another sound to use for placed ambient industrial noises.

Maes said:

Doom's sound distance metric uses the same approximate distance function used for range checks -and thus buggy/periodically repeating every 14K units in all directions, (except height, where it's constant) so sound in Doom is more like a 2D stationary wave in a big box - with a primary peak centered on the source and many secondary peak fronts/contours scattered around the map, following an anomalous and non-Euclidean periodic envelope profile. This can lead to very confusing situations, like e.g. hearing the annoying grinding of a crusher placed half a map away just as if it was in the same room.

The vanilla sound engine also messes up things like simple L/R positioning, to the point that using it purely to be aware of your surroundings would be suicidal. Essentially, sound is every bit as fucked up as the visuals -only cruder/plainer. If you consider Doom's visuals realistic...

Now, since Doom takes place on alien worlds with a very thin atmosphere, sound propagation should actually be slower than on Earth, and much more dampened. But as already mentioned, since Doomguy moves at about the same pace as a car, realistic sound would be like hearing people yelling at you through closed windows on a speeding vehicle.

...all of which can, should, and maybe should have been changed. You want to update sound quickly, so if, for example, the player turns around, the sound moves properly from speaker to speaker. But, the faster you modify sounds, the smaller the buffers must be to notice an effect (or your sound mixing code must modify the currently playing buffer, which can be tricky). Also sound code can be expensive performance-wise, which is often overlooked. Based on the number of sounds being mixed (internal channels), buffer size, number of output channels (mono, stereo, surround), sound mixer implementation, sound drivers, sound card, motherboard, etc, sound mixing can become expensive. But, yes, vanilla's sound code sucks, and needs some love to suit my needs.