Atomic Systems

HI, As i have recently obtained railworks 2 i dont hear rail clack ? i know my laptop is a intel celeron 2gb with a basic graphics card. but surely that sound should be on there any ideas?

Regards Mark.

can you hear a godawful snare drum sound? if so then believe it or not that's your rail clack in action!!

Rail joint sound or 'clickety clack' for want of a better phrase, is one of Railworks greatest weaknesses at the moment.

Armstrong Powerhouse has done substantial upgrades in the sound department, including new rail-joint and running sounds for locos, wagons and carriages. He does charge for them - though it is a perfectly reasonable amount.

jimmyshand wrote:can you hear a godawful snare drum sound? if so then believe it or not that's your rail clack in action!!

Rail joint sound or 'clickety clack' for want of a better phrase, is one of Railworks greatest weaknesses at the moment.

In all honesty, all default track sound is pretty poor. It's just too quiet for a start. The noise when passing structures or passing through tunnels bears no relation to any train I have worked or ridden on. The AP sound packs are certainly a great leap ahead. A lot of the default track on the modern routes is CWR, Continuously Welded Rail, so you won't get rail joint noises except occasionally. Prototypically this will be at Insulated Block Joints (a special type of rail joint designed to separate two adjacent track circuits), or when passing over common crossings in S&C. In fact, the latter point mildly gets on my proverbials, because both rail simulators I play (OpenBVE and RailWorks) simulate the noise at the switch tips, not on the crossing. It's not a deal breaker, but as a qualified PWay engineer it grates slightly*


*Also why I'm so pleased to see cant simulated in TS2012! It felt so wrong taking curves at speed with no cant!

Sounds is an area that Railworks needs to sharpen up on. Good sounds are one of the key elements for a rail enthusiast, perfection is absolutely essential.

I just watched a documentary on TV about the "Big Boy" steam engine in the USA. The host was laughing at some old dudes who had a tape recorder leaning out the window recording the sounds so that they could recreate them for their model layouts! The host simply said "looks nuts to the general public but only a rail fan would understand"!!

Sounds have to be spot on perfect or else they can completely ruin the experience and spoil an otherwise perfect recreation. The only developers who have got it right are Armstrong Powerhouse and Oovee, the rest suck big time.

Tad harsh. As long as a big grimy diesel sounds like a big grimy diesel, and a steam loco goes chuff chuff I'm pretty happy within reason

FoggyMorning wrote:Tad harsh. As long as a big grimy diesel sounds like a big grimy diesel, and a steam loco goes chuff chuff I'm pretty happy within reason

Sorry mate, disagree. Good, accurate sounds are absolutely vital. There is no excuse for shabby sounds. BVE which is now an ageing dinosaur and freeware to boot, has the best track sounds in the business. In comparisson Railworks track sounds are abysmal.
There are also several loco's from RSC and other 3rd party creators which feature sounds that are just not good enough. Poor sounds can be a real deal-breaker with hardcore rail fans.

jimmyshand wrote:Sorry mate, disagree. Good, accurate sounds are absolutely vital. There is no excuse for shabby sounds.

Do you have any experience recording sound on location & then editing those into something suitable for use in a game? If the answer is yes, then why are you not out there helping to improve the experience If it's a no, then I think you are being a little critical of developers, without an understanding of the difficulty they face in even gaining access to the prototype, let alone actually getting suitable recordings as base material.

Armstrong 421 pack southern emu sounds great!! seen and heard the video clip, as near as damn it i would say

jimmyshand wrote:

FoggyMorning wrote:Tad harsh. As long as a big grimy diesel sounds like a big grimy diesel, and a steam loco goes chuff chuff I'm pretty happy within reason

Sorry mate, disagree. Good, accurate sounds are absolutely vital. There is no excuse for shabby sounds. BVE which is now an ageing dinosaur and freeware to boot, has the best track sounds in the business. In comparisson Railworks track sounds are abysmal.
There are also several loco's from RSC and other 3rd party creators which feature sounds that are just not good enough. Poor sounds can be a real deal-breaker with hardcore rail fans.

+1

And re the follow up comment below from malky, no not everyone has the resources or ability to mix sounds (though I did a "GM" whine for a Train Driver 3 Irish 071 years ago) but if you are serious about reproducing a simulated version of a piece of motive power you need to be prepared to have a go or work with those who do have the resources. A couple of RW diesels I purchased recently (can't say which) did not exactly blow me away in the sound department which is a shame given that half the fun in having access to classic traction is reliving those glory days by the open droplight of a Mark One coach with the thrash and fumes drifting back from the loco. Obviously we can't have the "smellyvision" (yet) but correct sound goes a long way to helping.

As regards track sound, it depends to some extent which track rule is used but even when the effects play it is still pretty dire, has been since Day 1 of Rail Simulator. Even if the RSC team are sequestered away in their offices and not allowed near a real railway, it's something that ought to be relatively easy to synthesise and mix with the resources they must have available. It will be something of a fail for RW3 if they have not upgraded this aspect along with the eye candy and other items.

malkymackay wrote:

jimmyshand wrote:Sorry mate, disagree. Good, accurate sounds are absolutely vital. There is no excuse for shabby sounds.

Do you have any experience recording sound on location & then editing those into something suitable for use in a game? If the answer is yes, then why are you not out there helping to improve the experience If it's a no, then I think you are being a little critical of developers, without an understanding of the difficulty they face in even gaining access to the prototype, let alone actually getting suitable recordings as base material.

Malky, think you're being a little sarcy there mate. I think my car makes a rubbish sound but I'm not going to go out and try to build my own better car and challenge Ford am I? I am a customer of Railworks who has spent an enormous sum of money on it over the years and as such I am entitled to state my opinion on something commercial I have paid for.

I am not intending to have a go at anyone in particular but what I am doing is posing the question how come some developers can get the sounds dead right (Oovee / Armstrong) but others clearly cut corners in this department? A classic example was the recent 4cig. Numerous bugs and sub-standard issues with the sounds (including the awful snare drum track joints) were talked about on here at length on its release. Within a few days Armstrong had completely re-written them and produced a perfect re-work of a job that should have been done right up front. It's not just RSC but other 3rd party creators too who scrimp on the sounds and/or the cab.
The huge market for Armstrongs soundpacks shows just how wrong the original creators are getting the sounds. Armstrong must be laughing into his pillow everytime someone creates a new loco with pants sounds because he can quickly re-work them and make a packet in the process!
Conversely, Oovee has produced 2 engines with superb and faultless sounds, the 57 and the 156. That's the kind of attention to detail paying customers are looking for. Oovee prices his products the same as his competitors but the quality is different class, the others should be under pressure to match him

As a fairly experienced amateur sound recordist (for non-RW related personal use only I might add) I am fully in the 'it has to be damn-near perfect' school of thought. Acquiring a good library of sounds takes time but can be extremely enjoyable (especially if its loco sounds!) and just requires the recorder to know where to go to find them. I personally have a theory that payware creators are manipulating recorded sounds too much before packaging them with the model - I'd rather put up with the odd wind and unusual background noise than lose the core essence of the racket the loco is making. Similarly, I'd rather no tracksounds than random knocking / hissing noises that sound more like a blacksmith's than a train!

I think its actually the AP soundpacks and the Oovee Cl.156 that have convinced me that Railworks is actually the superior simulation experience compared to MSTS. I can't recommend enough the Mk1&2 soundpack from AP, it greatly enhances all viewpoints outside of the driving cab. I actually habitually switch to the passenger view now when I'm about to brake for a station to experience the grind of the treadbrakes!

Time to raise the game I think

Seb

I think it became clear early on with the Steam DLC that sounds quickly became THE focus of attention, perhaps overly so - they seem to get far more airtime than the physics and even the model itself. My view is that it is a very important part of experience, and I hope that we get a revamp of the basic sounds as it has been demonstrated that they could be so much better. If they could do for sounds what they've done for the lighting I'm sure we would all be very happy bunnies indeed.

Oovee and AP have definately raised the bar, and also a mention for JT's 20 sounds which I absolutely love.

B

Oovee and AP have definately raised the bar, and also a mention for JT's 20 sounds which I absolutely love.

And don't forget Matt (92212), who has worked wonders with Steam Loco sounds for us.

jimmyshand wrote:Sounds is an area that Railworks needs to sharpen up on. Good sounds are one of the key elements for a rail enthusiast, perfection is absolutely essential.

I just watched a documentary on TV about the "Big Boy" steam engine in the USA. The host was laughing at some old dudes who had a tape recorder leaning out the window recording the sounds so that they could recreate them for their model layouts! The host simply said "looks nuts to the general public but only a rail fan would understand"!!

Sounds have to be spot on perfect or else they can completely ruin the experience and spoil an otherwise perfect recreation. The only developers who have got it right are Armstrong Powerhouse and Oovee, the rest suck big time.

I have to agree with you there.

For my own experience, the sound is so much more important to me than graphics as it, not only makes the whole experience seem more real but, provides vital feedback (speeding on curves for example) particularly when visual cues aren't so good - such as at night or in inclement weather (yet another contentious issue). Granted, things have to move in the right way and look the right way too but if you're driving something that you know is built of metal, on rails made of metal, and it sounds like it's all made of plastic or worse, doesn't have any sound at all or sound like there's wheels missing (such as rolling stock) - the whole realism factor goes out the window and the term 'simulator' does not and can not apply.

I've always held some hope that the sound in Railworks will improve one day but with every new iteration I get more concerned that RSC are overlooking, or possibly deliberately neglecting, an absolutely vital element to their software. The fact that the term "Simulator" is to be applied to the next iteration of Railworks implies, to me, that not only do the trains look and behave like their real world counterparts but, they sound like them too (including interaction with the simulated environment).

Even if they did nothing else but improve the sounds of trains on track to make it sound like metal against metal then that would pay dividends in the realism factor...

Kr, Steve