No need to respond, I just wanted to convey my thoughts 
I’ll use controller next time, it’s definitely preferable for racing games. Have a good vacation!
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Thanks again for the input! @normalized also mentioned that the blur effect is a bit excessive and actually I also felt like it was a bit too much. Anyway, I’ll put it on my todo to optimize the amount of blur, now that actually two users confirm my feelings about it.
Regarding the engine sounds: I am a software engineer at heart and not really a sound engineer, so I actually solved engine sound in a special way: They are generated on the fly and there are no sound files for them. I also feel like they are a bit blunt and “unaggressive”. I was thinking of adding exhaust flames and suitable sound effects to make the audio a bit more aggressive.
Since it sounds like you have a bit more experience with designing sound effects: Do you have a hint what kind of noise / filters I could use as a base to create a growling / rumbling aggressive background noise synthetically? A few buzzwords would be enough, if anything comes to your mind 
I can then do any further research myself and bake it into my engine sound generator
Thanks for your elaborate feedback!
That’s exactly what I was hoping for: Get more ideas what testers would need to provide feedback! I put the windowed mode on my todo list, actually I wasn’t aware that this would be meaningful for testers.
The parameters of the yellow car (I generally call it the muscle car) really needs some love, @phoenixdk actually reported similar issues. Personally, I did not feel like it was uncontrollable, but then this is probably because I got used to the quirky behavior of it. I think the ride height is pretty high and the suspension is generally configured very soft. My idea was that it feels more distinguishable from the other car (a sports car) with hard suspension. But it should definitely not feel uncontrollable I will have look into it. Actually you can hit F4 during a race which opens a suspension tuning window.
If you are willing to, you could try if less suspension height and more stiffness and damping improves the drivability.
Minimap is already on my todo list, so it’s good that actually somebody feels like it is missing already
Many thanks for the hints how I could increase the sense of speed! Sounds like you already have some background experience on level design. I actually never thought about it that way (as I am totally new to game dev anyway), but it totally makes sense that high frequency signals in images create a sense of speed. And obviously a blur effect (=low pass filter) creates the exact opposite effect (I have a image processing background). TBH I haven’t spent too much time into track building yet, so there really are not that many objects or even materials as you noticed 
This will be on my way forward, but sense of speed is something I want to achieve as early as possible. So I will look into this for the next release
Hey everybody,
I have just finished and published the first gameplay trailer of Illegal Velocity on YouTube:
I hope you enjoy it and I would love to get some feedback!
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I haven’t made dynamic car sounds before, so I tried out some things. FM synthesis is sort of passable as a sample-less approach, it’s easy to get ‘physical’ sounds and feedback loops, but I couldn’t figure out something I’d be pleased with.
I also tried the sample approach which went better, using a small slice of a car starting up and just looping that in a looper, then adding some distortion to give it some grunt and unpredictability. The result sounded like this (I make some changes to the filter in the last half, but nothing major):
https://www.dropbox.com/t/NBMptJeT0sMGdwW8
There’s also a screenshot included of the devices used (in Ableton Live, as it happens), but it should work with any looper instrument and distortion. Be aware that the sound is actually two ‘notes’ one octave apart, so there’s some slight harmonic inconsistencies that I think make the sound a little less tonal.
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Thanks a lot! I’ll see if I can implement similar distortion filters for my car engine sound generator to give it some rumbling and randomness.
Actually it is all implemented as GD Extension (C++) and computed in real-time while playing the game. Anyway, if your curious here’s the paper which I used as basis, though it just covers the basic idea and the actual implementation depends on what you make out of it
This is the sketch:
Basically you have four base signals (sine waves) with some offset to each other, that simulate the 4 cycles of a petrol engine (based on the current RPM). The approach then uses wave-guides to simulate different parts of the engine blocks, pipes and muffler. The actual architecture of the wave guides is not described in the paper, so I had to figure this out myself. And basically that’s it I was pretty happy with the result and much better than anything that I could produce using samples
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That’s pretty much how FM (Frequency Modulation) synthesis works Adding different waves to each other to shape the waveform.
It’s a pity they don’t share the code or any audio, as far as I could tell. I think it may be a bit overkill for your purposes a full physical model, but this guy has an open source semi-physically modelled engine that sounds very nice and realistic. Maybe you could glean some techniques from there?
Played it again.
I like the rear view mirror! I think it’s much better than having the camera rotate backwards when reversing.
It was fun to play, but I felt like the breaks are too weak. Maybe having a second kind o break, like a handbrake, would be cool. It could break harder but would also make the car drift more, so there’s a tradeoff.
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Thanks for mentioning the correct technical term “FM synthesis”! 
This makes research on the web so much easier… It took me some time to even find the term “engine sound synthesis”, haha.
During my research for engine sound synthesis, I also came across this guy and his engine-sim. I guess he’s kind of a legend in this field. Anyway, his application really is overkill 
The output sounds REALLY good and convincing, but I looked into the code and this is actually too much to compute it in real-time for multiple cars. Though I can check once more if I can find some parts which could help me make my sound effects more aggressive.
The tool could also be used to record samples at different RPMs and then create the in-game sound by cross-fading / interpolating…? I actually I have no idea how the big ones do their engine sounds, but to my understanding they record real samples at different RPMs and mix them somehow to match the in-game RPMs, but currently real-time synthesis works better for me.
Thanks! Due to your feedback regarding the camera turning back, I researched on how reversing is handled in different games and actually there are quite some games which just keep the forward perspective. I tried that out and I felt like looking back during reversing is actually not too important (don’t do it in real life though!). Anyway, at some point I will add controls to look back, but for now the mirror seem to be enough Thanks again for your help!
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That’s my impression too, at least back in the day. The sampled one I made was made with just one half-second sample, being played back faster for higher pitches and vice versa. Just Loops Per Minute rather than RPMs
Hi everybody,
I have just published a new video on how I handle road construction and alignment of objects along the road in Illegal Velocity.
I hope you can draw some inspiration from it and would love to get some feedback!
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That’s awesome. Did you build this tool yourself?
Thanks! Yes I made this road toolkit myself I took a lot of inspiration from this video but I extended it such that objects can be programmatically aligned along the roads. I am currently mostly using this feature for the lanes of traffic agents in Illegal Velocity. Though it is a pretty easy to use it to place speed signs, traffic lights or lamp posts along the roads, too. It is also easy to extrude geometry alongside road. I currently do this with guard rails, but it can also be done for eg side walks, walls, fences, etc
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Very cool. I actually tried to build a very similar tool, and was partially succesful, but it had so many issues that I couldn’t figure out how to fix that I ended up giving up, at least for now.
Generating the road mesh that follows the curve worked ok (although the texture became blurry in some parts of the mesh, specifically on turns). Building the intersections mesh was more challenging, I got it working but in about 10% of the intersections it would generate the triangles in the wrong order, creating a broken mesh, and I was not able to figure out why and fix it.
If you ever feel like publishing that tool as an addon I think it would sell well. I’d pay for it, depending on the price.
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