Sound Quality. FMOD sound

[hotchillies]

A lot of the locos I have been driving recently have a weird sound quality, where the sound "meanders" from one headset speaker to the other. There have been one or two that were OK, I'm pretty sure of that but cannot remember which ones. It feels like some sort of sound vertigo, quite an unpleasant sensation. No other game I have has this that I remember. I'm on latest Windows 10, the Kingston HyperX headset, and Razer Surround Pro software (which makes all sounds amazing!).

I have tried turning off the 3D sound effect in Trainz but that makes no difference. For example the first loco in the session from Sebino Lake has this issue.

Does anyone else have this issue or know of any solutions? Is this a limitation of Trainz sounds?

I don't know a deal about sounds, but X-plane 11 has a great sound 'FMOD' engine - I wonder if Trainz could go that route ...

 

[JCitron]

A lot of the locos I have been driving recently have a weird sound quality, where the sound "meanders" from one headset speaker to the other. There have been one or two that were OK, I'm pretty sure of that but cannot remember which ones. It feels like some sort of sound vertigo, quite an unpleasant sensation. No other game I have has this that I remember. I'm on latest Windows 10, the Kingston HyperX headset, and Razer Surround Pro software (which makes all sounds amazing!).

I have tried turning off the 3D sound effect in Trainz but that makes no difference. For example the first loco in the session from Sebino Lake has this issue.

Does anyone else have this issue or know of any solutions? Is this a limitation of Trainz sounds?

I don't know a deal about sounds, but X-plane 11 has a great sound 'FMOD' engine - I wonder if Trainz could go that route ...

The sound engine needs work, to put it mildly, in Trainz and has for sometime. Hopefully after the release of TRS19, the Developers can go back and do some real work on the sound engine. This was discussed in the Trainz Dev forum quite awhile ago, but nothing has come about it.

 

[hotchillies]

Fair enough, it is becoming more apparent the more the graphics engine races ahead of the the sound engine.

 

[JCitron]

Fair enough, it is becoming more apparent the more the graphics engine races ahead of the the sound engine.

Definitely. There have been some minor improvements, but the sound engine is still old. I noticed that when there are many, many sound producing objects, trains, and other things making noise, the sound quality gets worse. When we have a lot going on, the sound becomes choppy and cuts out, and overall the sounds are way too loud for what they are. Crossing gates, crickets, frogs, and other scenery-type assets are all too loud. We shouldn't here the frogs or crickets at full volume while driving in the cab, nor should the crossing bells be full volume everywhere including in the cab. There are many, many other things like that which need looking at, and let's hope they get at some point sooner than later.

The graphics we have today are far superior even to what was in T:ANE, and that was light years (not kidding) ahead of everything prior to that. With all this beauty with the graphics, the sound engine has remained pretty much the same. It's time to give that a bit more than a lick and promise and move that on to the current generation to support more than the simple Sound Blaster video cards that were common when Trainz was first published nearly 20 years ago.