RAYA: Real-time Audio Engine Simulation In Quake 89
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.
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https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3/ [github.com]
Updated 14 hours ago. The updates never ended.
game developers take note (Score:1)
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.
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Id open sources its older code to act as an incentive to developers to license their latest engine. It's the same as MS giving away VS Express or a free hit from a drug dealer. Since most developers are already licensing an engine from someone else there is little incentive to open up their code.
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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 ha
Sound great, release a demo!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
I liked what I heard, but I really like to have a demo of it to check out.
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10% hit on relatively low poly collisions and very few sounds.. :/
Using the video as a basis, its clear the framerate halfs when RAYA is active.
I'd love to see some "real" benchmarks, but obviously the performance impact is too big at this stage. Which worries me, considering their using iD Tech 3 engine for this demo.
Theres alot of raytracing and calculations going on.
In essence, theres just as much (if not more) processing going on here, than a full game's logic loop.
The only way this would work in real world applications is to ensure this processing is done on its own
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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.
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This is the equivalent of ray tracing in graphics - nice effect, but very heavy on the computation.
With graphics, rasterization is faster, and the reason is that it can be characterized as "a bunch of cheats that happen to look good". Can we identify some similar cheats for sound?
Yes, I think so. Here's a paper I wrote 16 years ago outlining one possible, very simple, basis for soundscape generation.
https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~vrml... [uwaterloo.ca]
Unfortunately, I didn't get to progress with it as VRML faded out pretty qui
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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 o
OK, now do it for a game that has audio content. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Guild Wars 2 implemented a system like this to dynamically calculate both occlusion settings and reverberation and echo in real-time.
Somehow (Score:5, Funny)
Somehow this will cause someone to puke.
Ralph in 3...2...1... (Score:2)
*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...
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Shoot them there. You'll see.
Shoot someone in the lap, and they scream bloody murder.
Shoot someone in the face...well...the screaming stops...
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Or someone will figure out how to hit the brown note, which will make multiplayer griefing much more interesting.
Re:Somehow (Score:5, Interesting)
Somehow this will cause someone to puke.
As someone who's worked on 30-year-old acoustic ray tracing software models, the fact that they're attempting to get a patent make me want to puke.
Fortunately, we can count on the vigilant patriots at the USPTO to view the patent with skepticism, and bring a combination of deep domain knowledge and Rottweiler-like tenacity to look for prior art.
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If you'd like to be one of those vigilant patriots, there's a good chance [uspto.gov] that we'll pick up hiring again this fall.
But what would be the point? As far as I can tell, USPTO policy is ultimately set by campaign contributors.
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The USPTO isn't funded by campaign contributions, it's funded by patent application fees. Much easier to follow the money than assume ulterior motive being applied in a more roundabout way.
It's a shame Creative will be suing this. (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.
AMD TrueAudio on Kaveri processors and newer GPUs supposedly does just that. I haven't seen any game supporting it, though. Would be a nice feature I think.
Aureal demo on Youtube (Score:5, Informative)
A3D v2.0 demo on Youtube [youtu.be]. 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.
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Aureal A3D wasn't really all that magical or spectacular, its rose tinted glasses looking though a nostalgia tube, I had both and both were gimicky and you could hardly notice the difference
Re:It's a shame Creative will be suing this. (Score:4, Informative)
What if you tilt your head in headphones? (Score:5, Interesting)
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That might be a built-in feature. The sort of thing that you get "for free" when calculating the sound in this way.
But unless you are also applying the rotation to the character as it is rendered on-screen, it doesn't make sense to apply it. If the sound you hear is distorted without a corresponding graphical equivalent, it will just sound wrong.
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I never understood those head trackers. I mean, if I have a screen in front of me and turn my head to the right, then the display may very well change but I'm now looking to the right so won't see it (or need to look out of the corner of my eye). If instead I have a bank of monitors, so that I could see any adapted view - it wouldn't need to change the display!
Whereas, I can see benefit in your suggestion - we tilt our heads to identify sound sources so that would work quite well even without the visual
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I never understood those head trackers. I mean, if I have a screen in front of me and turn my head to the right, then the display may very well change but I'm now looking to the right so won't see it (or need to look out of the corner of my eye). If instead I have a bank of monitors, so that I could see any adapted view - it wouldn't need to change the display!
http://youtu.be/Jd3-eiid-Uw [youtu.be]
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I had only ever seen descriptions of tracking head rotation (or lazily scanned articles - more likely) and not considered tilt/vertical/horizontal.
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The other replies cover the window-like way of doing things. The other way to do it is to make it so that if you look right, the screen rotates to the right. Usually you have a multiplier, so that a small head rotation translates into a much larger rotation on-screen. Looking backwards might only require turning your head 45 degrees, which allows you to still look to the side and see the screen.
This might sound awkward, but your brain adjusts to it with almost no effort. The main problem I've seen with
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Posting as Anonymous simply because I'm too lazy to create an account.
You should look into TrackIR. It's one of the head trackers we use in the sim community (largely flight sims, but it's used elsewhere as well). Most of these head trackers use accelerated or exaggerated movement for looking around. This allows you to turn your head just a couple of degrees and you may be looking 90 degrees to the side, in game. It's also fully configurable along with a deadzone so the camera isn't constantly twitching
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That's not going to happen fast enough. Our hearing is exceptionally sensitive to timing, far more so than sight. As a result, the only way you get this is with speakers.
I strongly recommend getting a good 5.1 speaker setup if you're into gaming and enjoy positional audio. Vast majority of games nowadays have a proper directional sound implementation in software, so you'll get what you pay for.
You can have that... for a lot of money (Score:2)
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
Fake audio is useful. (Score:3)
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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A pretty good rule about hearing gunshots is:
If you hear the gunshot, they missed you. Even if the bullet is subsonic, you'd feel it before you heard it, if it hit you.
GSound? (Score:2)
I even have a basic working implementation of it modded into Arma 3...
Aureal Technologies (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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To be fair, EAX, while not actually calculating sound based on geometry, approximated close enough. I tested both Aureal's and Creative's cards back in early 2000 and difference was only noticeable if you really, REALLY focused on it in games that supported both A3D and EAX.
And most modern games use a full 3D positional audio with echo, reverb and other functions in software that sound almost as good as real ray traced sound on almost any decent sound codec. Though I still run audigy2 in all my gaming rigs
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If anyone ever needed evidence that excessive fanboyism is a destructive disease, I suppose this passes for evidence.
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Actually it was originally Aureal's project back in the 1990s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Pretty awesome stuff (Score:3)
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.
Games (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Not at all - still dumb as a toaster but just with a few more rules to match to simulate being good at one or two different things. It's a very contrived setting with very few things going on. Even, at an extreme, if something engages you in conversation there's very little to talk about so a small number of scripts covers all bases - that's your deluxe waffle
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I'd rather have both. This tech has been out since the original half-life days. It is not complex, not programmatically or computationally. The problem is the people driving the design of this system were sued into oblivion by a technically inferior Creative Labs. Realism and immersion are two different things. The ability to be situationally aware with sound is a massive advantage for immersion into a game.
In summary this tech has nothing to do with studios crapping out poor plots or crap AI. The engines s
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That is why I say: "The best AI ever designed was a live human opponent"
Lazy developers & designers would rather jack the hitpoints of a boss up to be 10x your life then to spend time making it behaving in an interesting fashion.
If you haven't played Dark Souls 1 & 2 with its PvP --- check it out.
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Audio = gimmick (Score:2)
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, a
Why creative??! why won't you advance A3D. (Score:2)
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.
Sounds wrong (Score:2)
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, especial