Ray Traced audio

[AluminumHaste]

Unfortunately not open source, so would require all the R&D from scratch.

 

 

This setup would be perfect for TDM. Minus the Voxel part, not sure how hard that would be to get working, but our meshes are low poly anyways for the most part, so it would run quickly regardless. (I would hope).

@stgatilov??

[I.C.H.I.]

Watched the video and it made me more sad than excited.

Majority of games always had piss-poor sound mainly because of this attitude of sound library creators that drives them to make their creation pay-walled closed-source, which basically kills the potential for it to be widely used. One can argue that people spent time making it and want some reward for that, but I will answer that there are already enough commercial solutions of this sort and you need to prove that yours is better than any of them. Yet eventually time kills smaller projects like that because their creators were too greedy and I really wish it was different, but people care about sound the least, so here we are.

Edited April 8 by I.C.H.I.

[chakkman]

TBH, I never had an issue locating where sounds come from in the Thief games or in TDM. With headphones, it really is no problem.

[I.C.H.I.]

1 hour ago, chakkman said:

TBH, I never had an issue locating where sounds come from in the Thief games or in TDM. With headphones, it really is no problem.

That's exactly what I mean when I say that people don't care about sound in games, because in reality Thief has very glitchy sound engine and so does TDM, neither of them respects the real laws of physics when it comes to sound propagation, merely because they don't have the means for that.

A few examples:

In Thief it is sometimes enough to lean a bit to have totally wrong stereo panning and talking about EAX reverb is just pointless because not only it is very crude by nature but also obsolete.

In TDM enemies often hear you through the walls or you may have wrong reverberation for the given environment only because the creator had no understanding of how it really supposed to be and just used his subjective point of view according to his quality standards and probably limited sound quality of the hardware in his possession.

Ray traced sound could solve such stupid issues but I absolutely hate that we don't have it in all games by this point, especially because it's not that heavy for the CPU if done right. Everyone sets high priority for the whistles and bells in the graphics department and nobody cares about physically correct sound, unfortunately.

[chakkman]

Don't forget that we're talking about games here which make A.I. being able to distinguish between friend and enemy by the sound of the footsteps.  

In every game, it's more than enough to create an illusion, rather than simulating the real world realistically. Same as in racing simulations, or with virtual musical instruments. It's not just enough to create an illusion, it's virtually impossible to simulate every parameter present in the real world.

Of course, that shouldn't hinder anyone to improve stuff (IF it is an improvement), just saying that it works for me as is now.

Edited April 8 by chakkman

[vozka]

I'm regularly thrown off by how unnatural the reverb in TDM sounds (and mission authors tend to use too much of it) and by how nonsensical the panning system is up close - you stand in front of a lock you're picking and yet sometimes the picking sound is heard almost entirely from the right and then the door opening sound is heard entirely from the left. I can imagine a trivial geometrical explanation of why that is, but it just doesn't work well in these edge cases.

I think there's a ton of potential to improve sound engines in games, for me personally this has a big influence on how immersed I am and how well I remember the game (Bioshock 1 was excellent, despite the fact that the reverb was also kind of crude in it, but it was used well and the sound design was great - I can still remember how it sounds). So I warmly welcome any improvements. But working with sound in various ways is both a big hobby and an occassional source of income for me, so I'm not exactly the average person (though arguably experiences like these are partially what led me to the hobby).

[grodenglaive]

9 hours ago, vozka said:

I'm regularly thrown off by how unnatural the reverb in TDM sounds (and mission authors tend to use too much of it)

The EAX system in TDM is complex to edit, but it does have simple to use presets for different room types (which is likely what most mission authors use, me included). I agree that the reverb is exaggerated in a lot of the presets. Unfortunately there's no easy way to tone it down when you use presets. They are either on or off.

[vozka]

3 hours ago, grodenglaive said:

The EAX system in TDM is complex to edit, but it does have simple to use presets for different room types (which is likely what most mission authors use, me included). I agree that the reverb is exaggerated in a lot of the presets. Unfortunately there's no easy way to tone it down when you use presets. They are either on or off.

I looked through the wiki and it doesn't seem that complicated. I don't want to spend the time to learn DarkRadiant enough to create testing rooms with different reverbs (I don't use it at all and when I tried it I spent too much time on basics like where to save which definition files and how to correctly use them etc.) so I'm not going to be super helpful here, but I looked through this thread dealing with that exact issue: 

And through this page: https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Setting_Reverb_Data_of_Rooms_(EAX)

It seems like the parameters in the version 2 of EAX Reverb are relatively sane, you only need a few of them and according to the linked thread (it includes a couple examples) it should be possible to just take existing presets and modify a couple parameteres that need to be modified. 

One important part of the wiki is the image of the table with existing parameters and their allowed ranges. It also contains contains a link to OpenAI EFX manual section that explains all the parameters in reasonably plain english: https://usermanual.wiki/Pdf/Effects20Extension20Guide.90272296/view#95

The way I understand it the parameters are used without the AL_EAXREVERB_ prefix and the most important one is the GAIN parameter, which controls how loud the reverb/echo is compared to the original sound, its default value is 0.32 and allowed range is 0.0 - 1.0, so setting it somewhere lower than 0.32 would be a good start. The second is DECAY_TIME, set in seconds, range 0.1 - 20.0: the larger the room, the longer the decay time, but at the same time the more filled with absorbent materials it is (carpets, beds, armchairs but also full bookcases), the shorter the decay and quieter the the gain.

There are other parameters that would allow you to make the reverbs and echos more sophisticated, but these two should be enough to fix the big problems.

 

[grodenglaive]

I would define that as complicated

[jaxa]

I see this as a 5-10 year coding effort, that would still catapult TDM among the best simply because sound is neglected so badly in the games industry.

I don't know if this is related to ray-traced audio, but PS5 has a dedicated accelerator called "Tempest" for "3D audio". It has been described as a "re-engineered AMD GPU compute unit". So you could think of it as one single unit for sound vs. 36 for graphics.

PS5 Pro is capable of 300 TOPS of AI acceleration, but it doesn't have an NPU. I think it uses more dedicated GPU cores for that purpose, like Tempest. So it's possible for graphics IP to be spammed and subdivided into sections that could be used for things like "ray-traced audio". We may see that in the next generation of consoles... if anybody cares.