Since the discussion of sounds has come up, I took a look at some of the sound-producing assets such as the older sounds such as birds, seagulls, etc., for example. There are many issues which need to be addressed, here and like many Trainz issues, the problems falls in both the laps of N3V developers and the content creators with the latter folks being lead astray by lack of clear documentation, and general content-creator created issues.
There's one setting in there that caught my eye to reduce the sound radius, which I think for starters is something the content creator should have looked at in more detail. The problem I see is the content creators had cloned a sound asset and substituted another sound for it and kept the parameters of the previous assets. This isn't an unusual process for creating assets, heck we all do it. Copy an existing one and change the data and names to protect the innocent, and viola, we've got a new asset.
This works most of the time for those mundane things such as buildings, and train cars, however, with sound-producing assets this can be a problem. If there's an explosion sound, or some other loud sound-producer cloned to produce crickets, we now have crickets that can be heard two kilometers around their placement.
The other issue is of course the sounds themselves. The requirement for a low bit-rate .wav file is quite obsolete today. This was okay in the days of the Sound Blaster 16 and other older RealTek sound cars, but we've come a long way since then. The now highly compressed low-quality sounds, really sound low-quality and really compressed.
Then there's the issue of the quality of the recording. I noted way back in the TRS2004 days that the train sounds sounded as if someone went on a field trip with a cassette recorder to capture the sounds. The overly loud, and way too saturated sounds, causes awful distortion due to being clipped out at the maximum. The lack of harmonics and distorted sounds makes some engines sound like vacuum cleaners instead of diesel electrics for example. Other files were recorded similarly by various people so that bells, car horns, birds, crickets, and so on are out of balance.
A more recent issue occurred around the time that N3V introduced the initial content repair initiative. Some repairers increased the gain rather than the amplitude to make some sounds louder. This in turn offset the starting point of the loop from zero sound to a higher level. This higher level causes the pops and clicks we hear now in some assets such as crossing gates, birds, and others.
So what do we do?
I think part of the problem can be resolved within the CRG and N3V where the actual sound-producing assets such as seagulls, birds, crickets, etc. are examined and adjusted for the obvious things such as gain anomalies, amplitude (loudness), and maybe the distance parameter in the sound script.
http://online.ts2009.com/mediaWiki/index.php/"Soundscript"_container
With this part settled, and putting all the sound-producing assets on a level playing field, N3V can update the sound-engine to modernize, and perhaps add in defaults such as the ambient tag where required which affects how a sounds is played. This isn't a one-shot and quick process, however, and like anything else will require a concerted effort on both N3V's part and on that of the community.
There's one setting in there that caught my eye to reduce the sound radius, which I think for starters is something the content creator should have looked at in more detail. The problem I see is the content creators had cloned a sound asset and substituted another sound for it and kept the parameters of the previous assets. This isn't an unusual process for creating assets, heck we all do it. Copy an existing one and change the data and names to protect the innocent, and viola, we've got a new asset.
This works most of the time for those mundane things such as buildings, and train cars, however, with sound-producing assets this can be a problem. If there's an explosion sound, or some other loud sound-producer cloned to produce crickets, we now have crickets that can be heard two kilometers around their placement.
The other issue is of course the sounds themselves. The requirement for a low bit-rate .wav file is quite obsolete today. This was okay in the days of the Sound Blaster 16 and other older RealTek sound cars, but we've come a long way since then. The now highly compressed low-quality sounds, really sound low-quality and really compressed.
Then there's the issue of the quality of the recording. I noted way back in the TRS2004 days that the train sounds sounded as if someone went on a field trip with a cassette recorder to capture the sounds. The overly loud, and way too saturated sounds, causes awful distortion due to being clipped out at the maximum. The lack of harmonics and distorted sounds makes some engines sound like vacuum cleaners instead of diesel electrics for example. Other files were recorded similarly by various people so that bells, car horns, birds, crickets, and so on are out of balance.
A more recent issue occurred around the time that N3V introduced the initial content repair initiative. Some repairers increased the gain rather than the amplitude to make some sounds louder. This in turn offset the starting point of the loop from zero sound to a higher level. This higher level causes the pops and clicks we hear now in some assets such as crossing gates, birds, and others.
So what do we do?
I think part of the problem can be resolved within the CRG and N3V where the actual sound-producing assets such as seagulls, birds, crickets, etc. are examined and adjusted for the obvious things such as gain anomalies, amplitude (loudness), and maybe the distance parameter in the sound script.
http://online.ts2009.com/mediaWiki/index.php/"Soundscript"_container
Code:
soundscript
{
morning
{
ambient 1
value-range 1, 0.1
volume 0.3
sound
{
0 ctry_day_1.wav
1 ctry_day_2.wav
}
}
night
{
ambient 1
value-range 0, 0.9
volume 0.3
sound
{
0 night_loop.wav
}
}
}
With this part settled, and putting all the sound-producing assets on a level playing field, N3V can update the sound-engine to modernize, and perhaps add in defaults such as the ambient tag where required which affects how a sounds is played. This isn't a one-shot and quick process, however, and like anything else will require a concerted effort on both N3V's part and on that of the community.