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RAYA: Real-time Audio Engine Simulation In Quake
New submitter bziolko writes: RAYA is a realtime game audio engine that utilizes beamtracing to provide user with realistic audio auralization. All audio effects are computed based on the actual geometry of a given game level (video) as well as its acoustic properties (acoustic materials, air attenuation). The sound changes dynamically along with movement of the game character and sound sources, so the listener can feel as if they were right there — in the game.
And you thought Quake client updates were over..
This is what happens when you DON'T open source your games. Your game doesn't make the news when researchers DON'T use your games for research.
I liked what I heard, but I really like to have a demo of it to check out.
Be seeing you...
I loved A3D. It might just be pure nostalgia, but I remember a lot of hackusations from enemies who weren't careful about how much noise they were making running around.
I was just observing how terrible "soundscapes" still were in modern games. This has promise, particularly if there is very little performance hit. Mind you, it's very little performance hit in Quake as opposed to modern games with *lots* more geometry...
But still!
Quake audio consists mostly of footsteps and bangs. This might be fun for, say, GTA IV/V, where the NPCs have conversations to which you can listen if you're close enough.
Somehow this will cause someone to puke.
There was a company back in 1997 that had a fantastic (series of) cards that did all this 3d transformation, reflection, deflection and occlusion of audio in hardware. The company was Aureal, and their A3D system was fantastic, doing everything that this demo showed. The competitor, Creative's EAX, instead used the entirely dumb method of "turn on reverb in a room". Creative sued Aureal, thinking that they had a leg up on 3D audio. Aureal countersued, and won, but the legal costs drove them into bankruptcy. Creative then bought Aureal's assets, and buried the company, and all it's technology, never to be seen again. In fact, EAX is still the stupid-simple (and very broken) "turn on reverb" (though now it also has "Adjust reverb"). And, as Creative have shown before (With the whole "Carmack's Reverse" fiasco) They're more than willing to use legal means to muscle their way.
For those who play in headphones, not with 5.1 or 7.1 surround audio, a system that tracks head rotation and tilting (similar to what they have for airplane sims, where you wear hat with markers and a webcam tracks your head position... and view in displays is changed accordingly) is needed. I haven't seen any of those at the market yet. Maybe you've heard about such things?
It is good to give devs the option of realistic audio, but for games in medium - big settings, the relative slowness of sound propagation is a problem. Getting a headshot and later hearing the sound is counter intuitive, at least for the hollywood generations. I guess that realistic effects with no delay in sound propagation is the way to go.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Guild Wars 2 implemented a system like this to dynamically calculate both occlusion settings and reverberation and echo in real-time.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
How is this at all different from GSound: http://www.carlschissler.com/g...
I even have a basic working implementation of it modded into Arma 3...
*BLORPH*
Oh man! Right in your lap! Sorry about that dude!
I'll try to aim someplace else next time...
*BLORPH*
Well...your face...at least it wasn't your lap this time...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This (audio raytracing) was done in the late 90s by a company called Aureal.
Their 3D audio cards were UNBELIEVEABLE. I played the original HL using one - and played CS using them - and they were a game-changer. If you had one, you were 10x better off than someone who didn't. You could tell how the battle outside was going on, by hearing how the people firing were changing position - if your team (you knew which direction they were entering combat from) were firing and moving forward, then they were winning.
One of the demos was a helicopter, circling the players head. You tracked it with your eyes and mind as it went round - it actually R E A L L Y sounded like a true, physical helicoptor circlng your head.
The Creative sued them into failure.
I've never forgiven Creative for this. I've never and will never buy any of their products.
Beamtracing, specifically nonlinear beamtracing, was originally a microsoft research project from a few years back having to do with realtime rendering on a GPU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QWntu70YKw
It was, mathematically, an attempt to utilize highly parallel GPU for tracing style effects. For whatever reason, probably to do with sample counts and etc. it never went anywhere for visuals. But this Sounds great... I wonder what it's performance is? Regardless, good to see that research didn't go to waste entirely.
A3D v2.0 demo on Youtube. I find it much more impressive than RAYA, possibly due to the HRTF in addition to the wavetracing. I had such Aureal Vortex2 card in the day. It was amazing how good the 3D positioning was, even with two pc speakers next to the monitor. Creative ruined it. For me, that alone is more than enough reason to boycott Creative to this day, and beyond.
Similar to what Aureal was doing with A3D back in the 90s, but obviously not tied to a specific piece of hardware like back then.
I enjoyed the Quake 3 demo, but it while it works decently well with just the player in the level, it sort of falls apart during the deathmatch. I think that's probably because the stock Q3 sounds have a bit of reverb baked in. I would love to hear what it would sound like with a complete set of reverb- and echo-less sound effects, so the RAYA can handle everything by itself, instead of working in top of the baked-in reverb.
Eat the rich.
Realistic sound has been around, as people point out, since the Aureal days. Now, to be honest, it should be baked into every engine and tied to your textures (soft textures absorb sound, shiny textures reflect sound, etc.).
The fact that it isn't means a couple of things - it's too expensive (which I can't believe nowadays), it adds too much cost to development time (but surely modifying those sounds for echo etc. is more costly than just putting in a pure sound and letting the engine modify it as necessary),, people just don't notice that much, or the patent field is too heavy.
Take things like TF2, HL, CS, etc. They are all same-engine. They are all 3D open environments. It is vital to know where shots etc. are coming from in order to play properly. But we don't see such audio tricks. That, to me, suggests they aren't necessary or certainly not the right value to waste time on.
And, to be honest, I watched "ray-traced quake" over, what? Ten years ago? That tech still isn't used in modern games because of the above reasons. It's do-able but expensive, the development time is costly, the effect isn't that much different from pure cheating on the 3D drawing, and it's not in any of the major game engines. This is suggestive of the value of such things being minimal.
And, to be honest, the realistic-"ness"of a game is the first few minutes of unboxing and then that's it. What destroys your immersion from then on is crappy plot, unrealistic capabilities, and AI that still - to this day - sucks. Fire gun, run around corner, wait for the idiots to pile round. The "better" ones might well throw a grenade but once you know that, you take account of that, and that's the AI beaten. To "win" the AI has to have reactions infinitely better than yours and outnumber/outgun you. Think about the average FPS game - there are several THOUSAND bad guys. And you. And though you might get stuck occasionally, you will win. You can use first-aid kits, they can't. You can lure them into traps, they can't (unless scripted). You can sit and wait them out. You can guess where they will walk next, they forget about you one second after they stop seeing you. It's ludicrous.
Please stop wasting our game industry by reinventing tech we've had for decades and could put in any game, given time. Let's try and make a game with one, single, scary opponent (and maybe some NPC's to fill in the gaps). A Matrix-like game, for example. Agents are few and far between, maybe one per real player. There is only one that's a real threat. And there's you. And a world that you can both use to your advantage.
When humans play humans you HAVE to have the same numbers on both sides. When humans play AI, you HAVE to be vastly outnumbered.
I'd much rather Half-Life 3 had intelligent enemies who will choose to camp the chokepoints and not be lured out, than some fancy water effect or proper audio reflections or whatever.
You're not telling me that with the CPU/GPU available nowadays, we couldn't make a Quake 1 opponent that - with the same programmed reaction times, capabilities, and facilities available to them as a human player - couldn't be a serious threat. I'd rather play that than yet-another "look how shiny" kind of game.
I looked into this back around 2005 because I know a few blind people and looked into audio only gaming. I wanted to make something like this to create like a first person audio only game engine where you could wander around and explore a world using sound cues (I was thinking of a detective story at the time)
unfortunately - yeah EAX was a pile of chod, and you had to buy a high end card to do *2* reverbs. completely pointless.
i looked at the FMOD engine, which although sophisticated - and seemed to be moving in a direction for immersive audio (IIRC you could put geometry into the audio renderer) - it still wasn't the clincher, even for me.
I assumed a kind of ray tracing system would work but never had time to persue it.
If there's one engine I'd love to see this in? It's Darkplaces.
Never mind making Quake/QuakeII/Quakex give audio cues that match the environment more precisely. When do I get a holosuite? I'd very much like the sound to match the image there, especially for some of the more, er, interesting holosuite programs.
The problem has always been that in games audio (sound tracks withstanding) is seen basically as a gimmick. A few games do it well, but for most, it's an afterthought.
The selling point has been, and always will be, graphics. Some reasons: Humans are predominantly visual, magazine based reviews can't demonstrate audio (this is changing due to youtube and other video reviews), lack of audio hardware that WORKS properly (IE; a sound card that processes EAX/positional audio, speakers to take advantage of it, and non-shitty drivers.. Fuck you Creative.)
This will not change until things like the Occulus rift become more mainstream; and shitty, non directional audio is the new bottleneck for immersion.
Most of the extra geometry goes into the details, though. A simplified-geometry version of the map would probably give almost exactly the same sound experience as the fully detailed version. I doubt if players could hear the difference. Moreover, if the objects very close to the sound source and/or the listening player are more important than the rest, they could cut out those segments in full detail and use a simplified version for the rest of the map.
I was never fortunate enough to actually own my own Aureal card.
But I really really can't understand why having bankrupted them, and taken all of their technology, creative didn't do the sensible thing and USE IT.
Even now A3D is still vastly superior to the latest EAX FIFTEEN YEARS LATER.
To me, this demo is serious uncanny valley territory.
When I was composing MOD music on my Amiga back in the late 80's, I was very much aware of the problem of playing the same instrument on the left and right channels at the same time, especially when doing pitch slides. You got all kinds of weird interference problems, or the audio version of moire effects, if you will. If you were good composer, it could be used to good effect in music in a lot of cases, but most of the time it was a real pain, especially with sound effects in games.
I hear plenty of that in this demo, and it's far different and more annoying than actual reverb. As it is, the sound is just too "off" for me to consider it an improvement, and just like 3D sound, I'd have this feature turned off.
For whatever reason, it isn't something there's much interest in, but it does exist. I am aware of three options:
1) The HeaDSPeaker. The cheapest option. A little device from a not very well known company called VLSI Solutions. It handles the head tracking and HRTF, you provide the headphones. Runs about 340 Euro ($450). It can take input either as a Dolby Digital stream, or directly as USB from the computer.
2) The Beyerdynamic Headzone. This is an all-in-one solution from Beyerdynamic. Has a decoder, HRTF calculations, headphone amp, head tracking, and a pair of DT 880s. Costs about $1700. Requires DTS or DD input for multi-channel input.
3) Then the grand champion, the Smyth Research Realiser A8. This thing takes measurements of your headphones, ears, speakers, and room and so accurately recreates the sound it is more or less impossible to tell it apart. The unit handles measurement, decoding, HRTF, head tracking and so on. However it costs $2900 for the unit alone, $3700 with the Stax headphones and amp they recommend for it. Oh and you need a good surround system to measure, so you either need to own one or book time on one. Needs either multi-channel analogue or HDMI input.
So it is out there... but you pay a ton for it. That's all I know of at the moment, it is a topic I keep track of because I have a lot of interest in it.
Actually it is rather expensive to calculate sound in that way. You might think 3D graphics are expensive but all games are simple geometric distortions of light whereas if you want a truly realistic sound engine you need to calculate wave effects such as diffraction, for a large wavelength range and a large number of materials.