Enhancing the Car Sounds of Forza Motorsport
17 October 2024- Turn 10 Studios
Nick Wiswell, Audio Director at Turn 10 Studios shares an update on the changes we’re making to audio for future and existing cars in Forza Motorsport.
Hi everyone,
I’m Nick Wiswell, Audio Director at Turn 10 Studios, and today I want to give you all some details on the audio changes you will hear in Forza Motorsport with the release of Update 13, Mustang Month, and our plans for future updates.
With this blog, I will personally address some of the feedback you have been sending us since we released the game last October. We hear you, and the plans that we are sharing today are in direct response to this – thank you for sharing your honest thoughts.
First, I’d like to give you some insights into the team we have assembled, and some important changes we have made to deliver the best audio experience possible when racing.
I’ve been at Turn 10 Studios since 2010, and I worked directly as Audio Director on Forza Motorsport 4 through Forza Motorsport 6. After that I moved into publishing focused roles working on Forza Horizon and Forza Street, and then into a more technical role before returning to Forza Motorsport full time in March 2023.
When I rejoined the team last year, most of the game’s audio content was already complete, so our efforts were focused on refining the assets we already had. After closely listening to your feedback, we have started incorporating new tools and processes into our audio workflow so we can deliver great sounding, authentic content moving forward. To ensure we have the best people we can leading these efforts, Turn 10 Studios rehired one of our former Sound Designers this past spring to help deliver these new plans.
To give you some context, this sound designer worked on Forza Motorsport (2005) through Forza Motorsport 3, as well as both Forza Motorsport 4 and Forza Motorsport 5 from a central Xbox audio team role. He then joined Polyphony Digital to work on GT Sport and Gran Turismo 7. I first met him when I was at Bizarre Creations working on the Project Gotham Racing games – Xbox’s premier racing game before the days of Forza – and I’m excited to work with him again. Between us, we have made a lot of great sounding racing games – and from some of the posts I’ve seen online, some of you would agree with this!
So, with a new audio leadership team, which includes another lead for our technology and development investments, we are set for the future.
To the state of audio in Forza Motorsport: I will admit that from an authenticity perspective, the game is not where we would like it to be. There are many factors that led to this, but we hope we can set things right going forward. Our goal is to fix these audio issues and ensure that all new cars added to the game are built authentically and uniquely. To achieve this, we have been overhauling our authoring techniques and pipelines so that we can update as many of the most egregious car audio issues as possible.
The initial work on this is now complete, and from Update 13 onwards, all cars added to Forza Motorsport will be built to this newer specification. In addition, a number of cars that have been flagged as inauthentic, both internally at the studio and by the community, will be updated over time.
The cars we are initially updating are with the release of Update 13 include the following:
- 2022 Pagani Huayra R
- 2014 Chevrolet #3 Corvette Racing Corvette C7.R
- 2001 Acura Integra Type R
We have also made changes to the cockpit audio on the 2010 Lexus LFA, following its update in a previous release.
As we look forward to future updates, we will weigh factors such as community feedback, internal priority, upcoming featured cars in game and the availability of suitable recordings.
I’d also like to add that there is a lot of speculation about how the car audio is made and where it is sourced. It is all created from recordings of real cars, either captured on a track or on a dyno. Our library contains over 750 vehicle recordings, and more are being sourced and added every month. The changes we are making are built around how these recordings are being processed and edited, and the way we assemble the recordings back together at runtime to be controlled by the in-game physics engine.
I’m not going to give too much of our secret sauce away, but it’s based on the combined experience of our audio team and software engineers, and we are very happy with the changes we are making.
We hope you like them too, and as always, we look forward to feedback from the community. Also, I’ll be speaking with you all next month – November 7 at 3pm PT – on the official Forza Discord server to go into more detail on our audio development workflows as part of the next “In the Garage” AMA. I hope to see you there.
Nick Wiswell
Audio Director
Turn 10 Studios
Transcript from Nov. 7 AMA added Nov. 22
The following article is adapted from a presentation and AMA (“ask me anything”) hosted in the Forza Official Discord on November 7, 2024. These remarks, explanations, and responses to audience questions have been edited for length, clarity, and accuracy.
Intro
T10 Platypus (event host): First off, could you tell us a little bit about yourselves, and your history in video games and audio?
Mike: Sure. I mean, Nick and I have known each other for probably 20 years now at this point.
Nick: We first met in 2004.
Mike: My own career in game audio is, I was a contractor on Forza Motorsport (2005), the original, the OG, and then I was hired as a full-time employee for Forza Motorsport 2. And so, I worked full-time for Turn 10 almost to the end of Forza Motorsport 4. Then I left to work for a different division within Microsoft. But I still had a hand in Forza. And then after that, I went to actually go work for Gran Turismo for a little while. And by a little while, I mean like 8 years. And then in a giant full circle moment, I’m back here for my second stint at Turn 10.
Nick: And yeah, I’ve been in the industry, it’s my 25th year this year. My first game was Fur Fighters on the Sega Dreamcast. And my first racing game was Project Gotham Racing, back at the launch of the Xbox. And I was at Bizarre Creations up until 2010 when I joined Turn 10, and I’ve been here for the last 14 years. I was audio director on Forza Motorsport 4, Forza Motorsport 5, Forza Motorsport 6. And then I moved over to a publishing role where I was more involved with the Forza Horizon games and Forza Street. Then I moved into a more tech focused role. And in March last year, I was asked to come back and take over Forza Motorsport again. So, when I joined Turn 10, it was me and Mike. And now here we are again, 14 years later!
How We Make Car Sounds
Nick: The first thing we need to do is research the car. As soon as the team agrees that we want to put a car in the game, we’re going to do some research: looking at the engine specs for that particular model and its drivetrain layout. Is it a front-engine, mid-engine, or rear-engine? What type of exhaust does it have, what type of intake does it have, etc.? And then the biggest question is, do we have this car already in our library of recordings? If we do, then we’re good to go and we can skip a few steps. If we don’t, our next first step is, is a car recording that we can use available for purchase? There are several companies around the world who sell perfectly acceptable car recordings for our needs. And if we don’t need to go record it because they already have, that’s a much better solution for us. But, that’s not often always the case.
Our next step is to locate the car. Can the manufacturer provide one? Do they have one in a press fleet, or in a museum somewhere, that we can record? If not, can we find a race team or private owner who has the car? Sometimes with rare cars, it’s quite difficult to track down who owns these things. But you know, we have a team of people whose job it is to go out and find this stuff. Once we find the car—is it located somewhere near a drag strip or a private runway that we can use for recording? We record all of our cars driving up and down on a track. A track with a long straight would work too–
Mike: It must be a long dry straight.
Nick: Yeah, a wet straight track, less so.
And then the most important question: are they willing to drive, or let us drive, the car at full throttle through the entire rev range all the way up to the rev limiter at speeds approaching the top speed of the vehicle? The answer is normally no, but we ask really, really nicely, until they hopefully say yes.
Mike: Yeah, we’ve gotten pretty good at it.
Nick: If we get all of this, then we can arrange to record the car.
How do we record the car? Here’s a picture of one of the car recordings that we’ve done. This is actually from one of our external suppliers, but it shows the multiple exhaust microphones that we can attach to a vehicle. In this case, there are 5 mics on that exhaust, but we record 14 channels. There’ll be multiple microphones pointing at the engine, the intake, exhaust, forced induction, so turbos and superchargers, hybrid systems, transmission, and a multi-channel microphone in the car, so we can simulate the interior of the car in surround.
Once we get the car mic’d up, we drive it up and down the runway in a single gear. We’ll get into first, second, third, fourth. Sometimes we can get to fifth gear, and sometimes we run out of runway, and we can’t do fifth (or we all die, and that would be bad) but we go as fast as the runway lets us in a single gear. Then we’ll do some driving through the gears and get some simulated driving.
And then also we’ve got the slow stuff. We’ve got engine start, idles, blip, shut down, horn, doors opening and closing, hood, trunk, bonnet…
Mike: And anything else that is really interesting about the car!
Nick: Yeah, any cool sounds that it makes, we’ll try and get all of those.
Then once we get the recording, we can bring it back to Turn 10. We find the best takes and the best channels within each of the recordings that represent the sound we grabbed. Then we’ve got to clean it up. We’re driving it up and down the road, so there’s road noise, there’s wind noise, and sometimes there are other sounds, rattles and just scrapes and things that shouldn’t be there, that we’ve got to clean up and get out of the recording. Because as the revs go up and down, sometimes there are sounds that don’t pitch up and down with revs. And they’d sound weird if suddenly they appeared and disappeared as you were going up and down through the rev range. So, we have to clean it all up.
And then there’s the secret sauce. We use a bunch of proprietary tools that take that and convert it into assets that we can use in game. We then need to implement those sounds. So, we’ve got our game-ready assets. We use FMOD Studio as our audio tech. FMOD is a company we’ve been working with for a very long time, all the way back to Forza Motorsport 2, and they provide the tools and tech that we use to play back the sounds in the game. We then take all of those samples that we’ve created, all those assets, and they’re then mapped to game physics, so that what you do in the game matches the sound exactly as if it was in real life. So, as you press the throttle, the sound changes, the intake comes up, the exhaust character changes.
Mike: If you tax at 5000 RPM, you’re hearing 5000 RPM, that sort of thing.
Nick: Yeah, as you come off the throttle, you’ll hear the character change, the intake go away, all the little bubbles and backfires will start playing and stuff. So, we reproduce all of that. And then, since for this version of Forza we’ve added audible upgrades, we have to do that for all the different audible upgrades. So, we’re not building one car. We’re building many versions of the same car within the car.
Mike: Yeah, it’s a giant matrix of stuff that goes into one car.
Nick: Race cars are cool because you’ve got a lot of upgrades that we’ve got to try and get sounds for. And then we test that everything’s working correctly and doing all the things we expect it to do.
And then we can take it to our final stage, the final mix. So, if one of us was at the session, we’ve got our memories of what the car sounded like on the day, we’ve got the original recording that we can go back and listen to. But we do also look at YouTube and online references and try and get a sense for what people’s expectation of the car is going to be.
Then we make sure that we’ve got everything working in the game, all the camera views sound correctly with the right sounds playing and positioned in the right place, in surround sound and doing that for both player and AI, including replays. Obviously with spectate mode coming in, replay sounds are way more important. So, we spend a lot of time making sure that feels correctly, and that you can hear the car in the distance as it would be if it was really that far away from you at that track.
The second part of that is the environmental audio. So, we have a system whereby the car sounds interact with the world as you’re driving through the world, and we have to make sure that all that’s working correctly for that specific car.
And then finally, we do a final mix here in our mixing room at Turn 10, which is set up for Dolby Atmos 7.1.4, where we’ll validate that everything’s working correctly, and the car is done.
And that is how you make a car sound!
Mike: Well—this is also just for the engine. This isn’t the tires. This isn’t any of the myriad of other things we have happening. This is literally just the engine sound.
Nick: And to be totally transparent, that whole process has some back and forth, because me and Mike sometimes disagree, and it takes about a week. So, a car from start to finish, we can usually do it in about a week. Oh, not the sourcing bit. The sourcing bit can take months, years, decades to find the cars we need.
Mike: Just depends on the rarity of the thing you’re trying to find. I mean, we’ve got a pretty good network at this point, of people who know people. But some cars show up and you’re like, dude, I think there’s two of these in the world. How are we going to find one of them?
Nick: And they’re like, oh, we found one. And they let us take pictures of it. And then we asked that person, can we drive it? And they say no, obviously.
Mike: Or they say “yeah, but we have to hire a whole crew of mechanics.”
Nick: So, there are a lot of factors that go into the sourcing side of it.
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