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Hey soundguy! Mike, love your work! Will we still be able to listen to these tracks on your spotify and on other sites? or are these going to disappear as well?
They will still be available on those sites, yes.
Hey soundguy! Mike, love your work! Will we still be able to listen to these tracks on your spotify and on other sites? or are these going to disappear as well?
They will still be available on those sites, yes.
But will they remain as Anthems?
Correct! This was a new intended use introduced in 2020, they will be able to stay as Anthems, no problem.
Hey Everyone,
I thought I'd jump in here to chat about this, since I was the original artist for almost all of the old songs on OST 1 and OST 2.
These were removed for a number of reasons, but boiling it down, largely at the time of ship, they were never intended to survive as long as the game has survived. Many of you have called out that it could be a "licensing issue' and that is mostly correct, however it is quite a bit more complicated than that.
There is a lot of legacy tied up on the behind the scenes of these songs and through the many changes that Rocket League and Psyonix have seen, it's been hard to keep them live.
However, we have kept a majority of favorite songs that are being referenced in the thread:
Rocket League is a 'fishbowl'esk physics game, so we have little control over how the player utilizes it. This new mix takes advantage of priorities to help carve away space.
I really can't figure out what this means at all.
Basically what I'm getting at is that you have full control over the experience given it's a physics driven game and everything happens in one place (fishbowl).
Oh an actual Psyonix sound guy! Hi there. Yes I know it's a thing, but the name still rubs me the wrong way. You know just as well as I do that there is no inherent increase of dynamic range potential in the actual system, like there is with HDR video (and increasing it might actually be undesirable, given loudness wars etc). But don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I think it's a bad idea to use it. It's the end result that matters, it's just the bs name that has me shaking my fist. They could call it Active Sound Level Balancing, or Priority Mixing or whatever. Even Pseudo HDR could do, maybe.
I'm however more interested in things that improve sound localization in RL. You guys should make a proper VR port of Rocket League where I get to turn my headset and make out the direction of a sound. ;) Either way, I hope the new mixing scheme works out great and that everyone is pleased in the end.
We have had numerous discussions internally of how it's not an ideal name. Absolutely agree.
Thank you for your support on the new system! Once it's out, if you have feedback be sure to post it!
Read moreThank you for those links. I read them, and now I understand what HDR audio is. It seems like a great solution for when a game designer wants to create an atmospheric game world that can accommodate a wide range of auditory situations.
For the love of all that is holy, please don't bring HDR audio to Rocket League! Any system with a sliding dBFS range has no business being implemented in a competitive video game! As described in your links, HDR will normalize the volume of the loudest audio at any given time, destroying the relationship between the distance to a given sound and its perceived volume. Please, Mike, please reconsider the implications of this system.
No longer will a player be able to judge exactly when to dodge when they hear a car coming in for a demo from behind. No longer will a player be able to make an informed guess of how far away another car off screen is jumping for the ball from. No longer will a player be able to easily estimate the direct...
I promise you we have done nothing to mess with the sensation of proximity in an unexpected way. In fact, one aspect in this new mix different from the current live version of the game is that we went back to the attenuation curves the game previously had. Specifically because of feedback that the community didn't like our last changes.
So from that aspect, the sound of the game will be more akin to the 2015-2018 version of the game.
With regards to the HDR system being used for atmospheric games, I do see where you concluded that. That being said, it probably could be viewed as more of a case by case basis. The system frequently works best in games where you're trying to control the chaos, such as the Battlefield, Crackdown, Sunset Overdrive, etc.
Here's an ...
Read moreAre there any style guides or specifications that clearly define what the industry term “HDR Audio?”
Yes! I've posted a few in other locations in the thread. :)
If the focus is on headphone users does that mean those of use with surround systems are going to end up with a worse experience?
Not at all! It scales wonderfully to a higher fidelity system. We just built ground up rather than top-down this time.
Also mentioned in the article is the next aspect we intend to add which is dynamic range selection. With this, if you have a big surround system, you can extend the actual dynamics of the game to match a 'theater' like experience.
Make it optional, I hate changes to audio. So much so that I use the same engine sound and boost on all cars.
The last attempt at changing audio was horrific. I've never seen anyone say "Oh this is a good game, but I wish it sounded different".
Sound in games all too often falls prey to the “good enough” mindset. Especially in the multiplayer realm where most games don't sound as great as the single player experiences where the developer has more control and insight into how the game is being played.
Yes, Rocket Leauge sounded O.K. in the beginning, but we know it can be better. We want the best possible experience for the community and work extremely hard to achieve that.
As a producer, it just sounds like they are sidechaining certain sounds to ambient sounds?
In a sense, yes. However, in some other ways, it’s not quite compression. If you’re really curious you can take a look at how HDR works in the audio middleware we currently use.
HDR Examples
The audio engineer in me squirms at the name HDR. Did they increase the bit depth? Nah. Is the dynamic range higher? Nah. It's just a hip marketing name for a different type of on-the-fly mixing that has nothing to do with increasing the actual dynamic range. I'm shaking my fist at thee!
The term is actually an industry one.
Numerous games before us have employed an HDR mixing structure with great success. Most noteably would be the work done by DICE. It is these games and many others that paved the way for Rocket League. Typically this type of iteration happens before a game ships, but the HDR system was popularized after Rocket League's launch. Once HDR came out, we saw an opportunity to improve Rocket League!
The first thing I thought when I finished reading the post was "but why?" The second thing I thought was "this has the potential to go spectacularly wrong".
Of course! Any large feature has that kind of potential. We have tested this thoroughly and have done everything in our power to receive feedback and iterate. That being said, once going to a live environment with millions of games happening, you can't account for everything and we will likely find bugs. But we will fix them quickly and hopefully keep you playing with sound! Be sure to give us feedback once it goes live, I promise we will read all of it and use your input to keep making Rocket League better.
Read moreI'm having difficulty understanding what the sound team is trying to achieve here.
Sounds, as physical phenomena, are pressure waves that obey the principle of superposition. That is to say, they are simply additive; in the real world, one important sound will not somehow make other less important sounds "quieter." In general, the primary factors determining how loud we hear something are (a) its original volume and (b) its distance to us.
If our monkey brains hear an "emphasis" on a certain sound, we simply interpret that sound as being closer. If you're putting emphasis on sounds for reasons other than their being closer (i.e. because you think those sounds are "important"), we still interpret that as being closer, only now we'll also experience a disparity between what we hear and what we see on screen. Every "HDR" tweak that isn't motivated by real physics is something that pulls the acoustics further away from realism.
In Rocket League, posi...
I apologize that our post didn’t do a good job of communicating our intent. Our main focus is on making the game cleaner. Right now the audio is fairly muddy and not useful. Rocket League is a 'fishbowl'esk physics game, so we have little control over how the player utilizes it. This new mix takes advantage of priorities to help carve away space.
While it seems that HDR is less realistic (and in some ways it is) the ending effect is an attempt to achieve more realism by increasing the perceivable dynamic range of the audio in the game. This system was spearheaded by DICE in wonderful sounding games such as Battlefield: Bad Company and Battlefield 3.
Here are a few quotes and some sources that will hopefully help explain the system better.
" In HDR audio, you can assign volume values to sounds of the game's virtual world that span over a much larger dynamic range than the standard 96 dB of 16-bit output devices, much like they would in the ...
Read moreWhat an odd thing... hmmm...
How strange...
Hello! Your friendly sound guy here... one of a few at Psyonix now actually! ☺ I assure you that this has not fallen on deaf ears! In the audio department we do listen and take into account any feedback you guys send out for the sound.
I know it seems like giving a lot of granular control over for the sound in the game is easy, but unfortunately that is not really the case. This is why you don't see games do this very often. When it is done, it is frequently limited to one area of sound or simply giving toggle on/off of certain aspects of the sound. (I would be curious if you have examples of games that have given more extensive control well? We would definitely look deeper into them.)
That being said, we are always working to better the sound in the game and I promise you we will take all of the thoughts on this thread into account. You should A/B from the original ship! It's quite a difference and a good chunk of that is from thoughts you guys had!...
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Oh but it is...
Isn't OEM-D the dominus too?
That is correct! However up until a certain point all the cars were sharing these four engines. So we just listed the original cars that wouldn't be updated with a unique engine.
These cars still share the V2 versions of the OEM engines.
Hmm... interesting... Can you upload a video? Also, what are your system specs and output format (5.1, Stereo, Headphones, etc).
In an era of gaming where most developers behave like politicians, we have Psyonix; the company that brought us a game with as much replay value as any, at a third of the cost. The fact that Mike was even willing to open the message, let along click the link and listen to the song, embodies everything about Psyonix. They listen to the fans, and they do a phenomenal job at giving us what we want... and have yet to charge an extra dime for core content. I can honestly say Rocket League is one of the best twenty-dollar purchases I've ever made, and even if Mike was just hoping the song sucked so he could make a quick five bucks off my money-back guarantee, it wound up making a big difference for my buddy.
Also, if any of you guys wanna play 2v2, hit me up on Steam.. my username's the same over there. I kinda suck, but I'm a solid teammate.
Thanks for reaching out to us dude!
We are huge fans of supporting smaller artists here... I know first hand how hard it is to actually get people to listen when you're starting out, and we know first hand at Psyonix how hard it is to get that one good opportunity. I'm just stoked Rocket League was able to help Andy and DeAnna be heard. It's an amazing tune and they both are super talented. I'm happy to see credit go where credit is due!
Much like Ether, Kev Frey, and all the other artists that have gone into Rocket League, we are just happy to build up others when we can. :D
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I see what you did there.