What sound effects need more variety?

[Magic_Al]

After you play any GTA game long enough you notice certain sounds that would be unique in real life are repeated. For me currently, the sound of one car hitting another is one that sticks out as something that should sound more different each time. "Oh that sound effect again" isn't what you want to be thinking.

 

Audio takes a lot of space on disc and audio filters and effects take CPU power. What can Rockstar do to make the acoustics of crashes and other events more random and unfamiliar after dozens/hundreds of hours in the world?

[L-C-P-D]

When you shoot a gun in, "Grand Theft Auto 4" you hear that same civilian scream over and over. And that famous saying from taxi drivers, "Stupid Malaka". I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about. They should add more of a variety in moments like that. Edited September 2, 2012 by L-C-P-D

[36Chambers]

NPC's need to sound different and need to be doing things that make them seem more alive. If they could borrow the guns used in Max Payne 3 then that would be absolutely fantastic. And car sounds should be more diverse. (tire sounds and stuff)

[saintsrow]

 

After you play any GTA game long enough you notice certain sounds that would be unique in real life are repeated. For me currently, the sound of one car hitting another is one that sticks out as something that should sound more different each time. "Oh that sound effect again" isn't what you want to be thinking.

 

Audio takes a lot of space on disc and audio filters and effects take CPU power. What can Rockstar do to make the acoustics of crashes and other events more random and unfamiliar after dozens/hundreds of hours in the world?

Good ideas. For crashes and gunshot echoes, perhaps there could be a small library of fundamental sounds that are mixed at the moment they are needed, with amplitude and delay parmeters that provide a much wider range of permutations of sound, while keeping the total size of sound files down to a reasonable size.

 

I also agree with L-C-P-D that some repeated sounds are particularly remeniscent of old-school video games where the exact same little sound snippet is associated with a given action. So I too hope that Rockstar does something in general to increase the variety and avoid these primitive associations.

[Adriaan]

As I posted here, maybe there could be improvement on the engine start ups. In GTAIV they all sort of shared a very quiet generic start-up sound.

 

They should add more variations among the vehicles, like:

 

 

As for hardware limitations, my understanding of it all is that it's more of a ram issue than a space issue. As things like crashes can happen sequentially in a short amount of time, by adding more variety in the available audio clips pool for that effect on disc, it can suddenly bring a multitude of audio clips into memory (thus limiting other assets from loading into the game world, be it other audio effects, textures etc.).

 

The best example I have with this is the repeated vehicle effect which have been in every GTA. They have a form of object pooling going on whereby a limited amount of vehicles are brought into the game's runtime resources (ram) from the disc, resulting in repeated vehicles as ram can only hold so much assets in its limited space.

 

However, worth highlighting is that assets which are not used anymore is unloaded from memory (e.g. a building not in view anymore) or, as in your example, "crash" audio clips. It will only by streamed from the disc again into memory when it needs it (when you crash). So sounds like no problem, right? Partly true, but loading and unloading assets has a performance hit. Too many of these together, and you have a drop in frame rate, which is not good. That is why it doesn't happen so often, and that is why there is only a few audio clips for things like crashing, footsteps etc.

 

 

This is referred to as garbage collection, which in a GTA game example, means the process of unloading unused assets from memory only happens every now and then (not every frame). To have more variety in audio clips (or vehicles), requires more ram - which consoles just don't have.

 

 

However, I do feel there are areas of variety with sounds that don't occur so much in a repeated manner (and will be cleaned out of memory by the next time it needs a different variation). Think of the GTAIV engine start-up sound example, whereby most vehicles share a common engine start-up sound. They can have much more variety in this area.

Edited September 2, 2012 by Adriaan

[Eagle-Eye]

The sound effects of farting need to be more liquidy & vivid.

Like Mozart's Melody