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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.
https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3/
Updated 14 hours ago. The updates never ended.
I liked what I heard, but I really like to have a demo of it to check out.
Be seeing you...
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.
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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.
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.
The thing is stuff like this and raytracing graphics are best served by parallelization, so it's not so much an issue of cranking out more performance as it is just finding a way to put it on something like a GPU's worth of stream processors.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
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.
there's really very little difference between optimizing audio and video. back-culling polygons and all that magic to increase framerate by lowering processing overhead. Same thing with audio. It's just that it hasn't really been taken very seriously in the past.
When Marathon came out, it had "ambient sounds" that changed as you moved in relation to their source. They were also in stereo. (these were new, no other fps had it) Sound effects from map features, weapons, and ordinance were adapted based on distance from you and were also in stereo. Sadly, lery little has changed since then.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I think you could compare the Quake engine to the M1911a1
It found perfect utility in few revisions. Most every other handgun of its type is based on it now. It remains fairly unchanged, yet extensible. Sport, self defense or war, it is the modern standard for the handgun. Quake has found much utility that has kept Id in good company with various technologies, developers, researchers that all add some code that may or may not be useful for present gaming, but could find its way in the future. I'd say they have invested and reinvested this game on top of all the returns they have already had from it. Carmack must be quite visionary. It reminds me of a farmer adding manure/compost back to the soil rather than hauling off waste. It is reinvested in the soil to produce future returns. Publicity, investment, research,product all go hand in hand in a symbiotic way. Carmack is only applying universal truths.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!