Vehicle Audio of Mafia III: Recreating a Classic Era in Automotive History

[Music] new boor a forign city with traditional Southern values underestimated how far is going to go why do you use want them to do this is City to survive War 1812 the Civil War and God knows how many hurricanes but when Lincoln clay went after the M he infed more damage all wars and hurricanes [Music] combined good morning everyone welcome thank you for coming along um my name is Matt bow I'm the audio director for hang of 13 uh we are a studio within 2K Games

head by Hayden Blackman um our audio team consists of myself two Junior sound designers two senior sound designers um our engineering needs kind of fluctuated up and down a little bit um from you know one person part-time to to three people and some really great external contractors that we worked with um if you're not familiar with the game Mafia 3 uh I'll just walk you through it very briefly it's an open world Third Person cover shooter it's set in the town of new Bordeaux that's our fictionalized version of New Orleans in 1968 um it's the story of Lincoln clay he is a man of mixed race he's an orphan he's a Vietnam vet and he's uh uh returned home from the war to find that his surrogate family the black mob are deeply indebted to the Italian mob um and and throughout a period of time uh his his family is basically slaughtered by the Italian mob and he goes on this sort of quest for Revenge um it's important to note that even though this is an established franchise

for 2K uh Mafia 1 and 2 were built by our studio in the Czech Republic uh this is the first project that hanger 13 Dev team took on so we were building a brand new team a brand new engine and an open world game all at the same time um if you're not familiar with the game I'm just going to show you a really quick two-minute clip that just kind of quickly encapsulates a little bit of the story of what's going on God damn it you fre the [ __ ] alarm get on God fck [Music] [Applause] [ __ ] everybody all right that was a craziest [ __ ] thing I've ever saw why you get us something off the top shf we need to celebrate yeah got me f me up no

something Ling possibly the bad [ __ ] I ever laid my eyes on you shouldn't have said [Music] no [ __ ] you think you're G [Music] [Applause] going to keep going you got night more [Music] [Music] [Music]

I um I forgot to mention it's a violent game there's a little bit of language in there um so what do expect over the next hour uh I'm going to walk you through how we attempted to deliver period authentic vehicle audio in a large open world environment some of the things we learned along the way I'm going to do a pretty deep dive into the recording techniques we did for cars trucks Boats and Tires and touch on some of the implementation methods that we chose um simple stats about the game I'll just run through this really quick uh there were 90 plus Vehicles 40 plus weapons about 10 districts 10 full suburbs we had to build a little over 4 hours of cinematic material uh we had a licensed soundtrack of about 106 songs uh original composed score three full radio stations with uh complete with commercials news all that kind of stuff um we were about half a million lines of dialogue once localized uh we used WIS inside of our own proprietary engine uh we mixed in 71 and our audio budget kind

of peaked out at around 75% of one core and around 206 Meg um on average we were a little bit less than that but that's kind of where we peaked um so really early in development what we knew was that the time period was going to be 1968 and I needed to find cars from 68 and about 30 years earlier than that and when I knew I needed classic American and European cars I needed trucks boats and we had to service about 90 fictional vehicles in the game um our goals were to deliver authenticity uh actually these first two goals really came from kind of Studio pillars one was to always remind the player that they were in new boo in New Orleans in 1968 so we wanted to always convey a sense of time and place and authenticity but then at the same time we had this other goal which was to deliver this Hollywood action driving which basically meant excitement versus simulation so immediately there's a contradiction between being authentic and being over the top and we had to kind of draw a line there um we always wanted to immerse the player into the car and we did that through radio stations uh the vehicle interacting with

the environment all sorts of environmental changes when you're in the vehicle and we knew we wanted to provide a big variety um yeah all the cars in our game were fictional makes and models so we had a little bit of Freedom there our recording goals were really simple you know Safety First don't be stupid Try Not To Break [ __ ] capture Great Sound and then if we had time take some photos and video while we were there and I'll show you a few of those recording sessions uh throughout the next hour um so how do we find these cars we started by trying to plug into the local community so we started going to classic car shows and we ended up partnering with a A Car Club who wasn't really tied to one particular brand it wasn't like the Corvette club or the mustang club it was just this local Club of about 650 members and they had everything from old cars to new cars fast cars slow cars and and they ended up being kind of an agent that would help us find all the different cars we wanted um we had friends make suggestions we ended up working with a truck service center just north of here in greenbury uh a Marine

Service Center in selo and we also went to a supercharger Factory uh down in Southern California um so some of the the challenges of scale we knew it was going to be time and cost prohibitive to record 90 unique vehicles um so we decided to just find the most diverse group of engines that we possibly could we needed a mixture of some regular cars and some high performance cars and we had to figure out how how and where we were going to do this and you know I had these these really early goals of you know I love racing games and and I wanted to be as detailed and as amazing as some of these really great racing games that I love to play and really quickly reality set in that you know this is just one slice of a much bigger pie you know it's it's an open world game it's not purely a racing game and you know we had to think about our allocation of resources not just memory and CPU but how much time we could devote to this and and of course the cost so um you know even though it was much a smaller part of a much bigger game our goal was always to try and reach to be as good as possible or as close to these really amazing racing

games that I love to play um our final count ended in at 30 recording sessions which was 20 cars two trucks seven boats one electric car and now we're actively recording new cars for our DLC Packs um when it comes to recording a car or any type of engine there's there's a whole number of different ways you can go um and I'm not going to claim that our method was better or worse than anyone else's I'm just going to walk you through some of those different methods you can choose from um you can go out on an open track or open road uh you can use a roller dynamometer or you can use a hydraulic dynamometer which I'll I'll go into a little more detail um and each one of those has unique challenges and advantages and disadvantages and there's probably other methods out there these are just the four that I was really familiar with um what we chose to do was use a diner pack for our cars uh we took our tires to a racetrack we did our trucks out on the open road and then boats we recorded both in water and on dry land and and I'll go into more detail in that in a moment

um so if you're not familiar what's a Dyno a Dyno is basically a treadmill that lets you put your car on it and drive the car at any speed you want while it's not moving and it's something that allows a mechanic to tune the car uh measure the performance of the car and basically you know change the performance of a car at all different speeds while it's stationary um so why choose a Dyno it would be so much more fun to get out on a racetrack and and thrash around in these cars um why why do this method uh for us it was it was a few things it was really a matter of safety you know we're dealing with old cars that are 45 to 75 years old I don't know how reliable they are I don't know if the brakes work I don't know if the steering works I don't really want to put my team members in these cars and send them off at high speed down a racetrack um but it also provides a really controlled recording environment uh you know we minimize the risk of damage to these cars and we have this kind of hands-off miking approach uh when I started speaking to some of the vehicle owners they got really concerned they they imagined us driving around racetrack with all sorts of stuff

clamped and taped to the side of their cars and and these are old show cars with beautiful paint jobs and you know they take them to displays but they don't really want to push them that hard so um when when we started suggesting this as a method to record we earned their trust much more easily and they were willing to work with us because it was a much more hands-off approach much more controlled environment um the downside of recording with a dinno is that it can be kind of too clinical sometimes you lose some of that great character of an engine um and you also have a lot of overheating risks uh when you're in a controlled room like that you have to put really large fans in the front of the engine to bring air flow in and exhaust fans at the back to pull the exhaust out and we don't want that for recording so we would record with the fans off which meant we had to be really really careful to not overheat the cars um here's a picture of the dyno we used with a 1940s Plymouth so there's two different types of dinos that that at least I'm aware of uh there's a traditional roller Dyno which is really quick it's really easy you just drive the car straight on it

works with almost any type of car and it's really common easy to find the downside is that the rollers themselves produce so much noise that it kind of makes it impractical for recording um there's also a slight safety risk in that the there's a lot of inertia involved in the car and it can break and launch forward into the wall um but really the biggest downside for us is the noise it just ruins the recording so if use a dino pack which is a a brand developed in New Zealand it's basically a hydraulic brake you take the wheels off the car you bolt this machine directly onto the wheels and it's a computer controlled brake that dials up the resistance and the load on the engine um the big bonus is that it's practically silent it makes no noise at all it's really accurate cuz we're working with old cars where the gauges probably aren't really that accurate um and it's really safe there's no inertia there's no chance the car can break and and launch forward the downside to it is that they're really rare they're hard to find um and you usually have to work with a high performance Workshop that's really expensive um it takes a lot longer to

put the car on and off the dyno um you have to basically Jack it up and take the wheels off so there's there's more time invested and uh one of the other downsides is that it there's certain cars it just won't work with you know if you have side exhaust pipes or really wide fenders or non-standard wheel types chances are you can't put the car on the dyno and um the little side story about this car on the lower left here um this is uh late 1960s canm McLaren race car uh when all said and done it's about $800,000 the thing had just been rebuilt from head to toe and the owner agreed to let us record it but we had a 48h hour window that we had to record it before he was going to ship it off to a Race So we found a machine shop that basically built us custom adapters within 2 days so that we could stick this machine on the dyno and capture it it was um it was an 8 L 800 horsepower v8 it it it's the loudest car I've ever heard it if you can imagine a lion right here kind of roaring at you that's what this thing sounded like um so there's a picture of that car on the dino with the body removed and you can kind of see where we

had custom adapters to fit it in uh that was one of those cars where you know your ears ring for 3 Days even with hearing protection um so typical schedule uh through a little trial and error we worked out we could record about three cars in one day um it was a a pretty long day but uh it basically took us an hour to set up 30 minutes to pack up um it's really important to note that before we turn the key on any car uh myself the vehicle owner and the dyno technician would have a quick conversation and we talk about the limitations of the car you know the the RPM ranges that they're comfortable with the temperature ranges that they're comfortable with and basically just let them know that we were going to respect their property and we weren't going to be irresponsible with it and and then the owner was really comfortable and letting us do what we wanted to do um it take up to an hour to mount the car and up to half an hour to Dismount the car the recording itself was quite easy it it took us less than an hour per car and then we' do a Folly session with each car afterwards so some of the limitations we ran into

was that we're dealing with old cars that are have various levels of reliability their cooling systems are nowhere near as efficient as modern cars um some of them just can't do what you want them to do we had uh we had one car that couldn't rev more than about 22,000 RPM um this car that's in the picture here this is a a 1930s American bantom for anyone who's familiar with engines it's a it's a 2.8 L V8 with a flathead supercharger and dual Webers and and it's a really inefficient cooling type car so this car we could record for 12 seconds and then it would overheat and we'd have to stop for 10 minutes and then we could record for 12 seconds and then stop for 10 minutes but it sounded so amazing it was worth it um at the other end of the spectrum we had a European car whose name I'm not allowed to mention but they're Italian and they like red um and the owner of that car basically said you know you can do whatever whatever this thing lets you do push it to 8 and a half th000 RPM if you want and um and we did and it sounded fantastic um one of the things we learned that

regular cars just sound kind of boring you know we we had this idea of not everyone in the city owns a hot rod so we have to have this mixture of regular and high performance cars and the regular cars just sounded more boring than we thought they would so I think for future we will always go with slightly modified and heavily modified cars and and then the really obvious one was that anything with a rear engine was going to be really difficult to get a separation of of engine and exhaust um so specifically some of the things that went wrong we had some cars with starter motor issues one car had a carburetor issue uh two overheated we had some cars that didn't show up on brief they they had different wheels and different exhaust pipes uh we even had some car owners who they had these really beautiful show cars and they wouldn't drive them if it was a wet Road the day after raining so the key there is really to have backups planned you know before your recording session um so now we know what we're going to record where we're going to record and how we're going to record but now we get down to the meat and potatoes of what we're actually going to capture um we decided to do you know engine

start stop false start idle rev blips we do ramp runs which is basically getting the car from idle all the way to maximum rpm and we would do that fast and slow and that was mainly as a reference so we could hear what the car should sound like as it's as it's accelerating and decelerating uh we decided to record Loops of about 6 seconds which we didn't need that much but it was just enough for us to work with and we would put a really high load on the engine and we'd do uh a really fine level of Loops you know 200 RPM increments all the way up to 2,000 and then 500 RPM increments up to Red Line and then we'd repeat that whole process under a low load our goal was to get three perspectives we wanted the engine the exhaust and the interior and then afterwards when one car was finished we'd take it to another location and do a fly session of everything that opened and closed and clinked and clunked um while we started preparing the next car um the gear we used I won't run through this in high detail but basically it was a it was an 8 channel sound devices unit um if I could only choose one microphone for vehicle

recordings it would be the DPA 460s um they were reliable in every single situation and really versatile and and if I could choose one mic that would be it um uh I guess the other one to note is the AKG d12's which are really designed for kick drums but we used them on exhausts to get that really low Rumble of the exhaust and then over time as we did these sessions you know we expanded our kit we were recording directly into Protools through an interface at one point uh we added a zoom f8 so that we could slave the two together and get 16 channels so over time we kind of expanded our kit um just really simple extra Common Sense stuff to bring to a recording session you know bring cameras bring first aid kits um spare cables and batteries of every kind and probably the most important thing to note there is sandbags you know the last thing I want to do is hang a boom over $150,000 Porsche and then have the mic stand fall over and Dent the car so it's really important to get some really cheap sandbags and weight everything down um some really Common Sense tips when

you're recording Cars you know confirm everything the day before you know it's not as important to them to show up to your session as it is to you um plan plenty of backup cars in case if you can be flexible some of these cars don't do what you want so it's really important to adjust your priorities and if a car is overheating you may have to kind of decide what are the most important things that I need to record now and of change your change your plan around a little bit um and then just use whatever method is the easiest you know it's it's really impractical to be typing into an IP had when you're moving on a boat at 90 mph so you know use pen and paper use laminated sheets use whatever is really simple and just easy um and then the biggest takeaway here is investigate what your legal issues and permits and insurance needs are really far in advance um for our tire session which I'll show you in a moment we started working with our legal team maybe three months before the recording session and you know their rules were really simple don't break the law be safe and responsible and everything from that they were willing to support us with but um but sometimes that can take a really

long time to prepare you know we had to prepare nearly three months in advance for that recording session um so where to place the mic well this is as open a question as any you know it's it's all down to choice for an 8 mic setup we chose to put three in the engine bay uh four on the exhaust for a dual exhaust system and one on the interior um over time we expanded to 16 mic setup and that wasn't really because we needed more coverage of the car it was just because we were getting different tonalities from different mics and on some of those really expensive rare cars we just wanted to have backup channels as well um but specifically we would put the DPA Labs inside the engine bay and usually we would put one close to the intake to get that kind of sucking air sound and then we'd look for something else that was unique and different inside the engine and uh sometimes that was down at the back firewall sometimes it was underneath the engine near the near the exhaust manifold um it was basically just looking for something that was different and unique about that engine um and then we would have one mic a few feet back from the engine to just get an overall pitcher and we would put two shotguns at

the back of the exhaust and then the two AKG d112 to get the low Rumble of the exhaust and then usually just one mic on the interior down where the passenger's feet would go um and I'll show you a video of the cars sort towards the end uh when it comes to trucks it's an entirely different Beast um the challenges we had was being able to record them in isolation we we couldn't find a Dyno for trucks um so we ended up recording them out on the open road we did one day per truck just by myself um and the most important thing is is a highly skilled driver is more important than the truck itself um and I'll get into that in a moment uh trucks are really hot engines and I was really worried about these really thin mic cables just melting in five minutes so what I ended up doing was going to a hardware store and buying a dishwasher hose it was really cheap um it was a way to run all the mic cables through and insulate them and we we were able to do these sessions without damaging anything um the truck itself is a a big clunky machine and so you try and use the body

of the truck to build natural wind brakes and I'll show you a picture of that here you can see kind of towards the back of the truck we we used the frame to position our mics and we wrapped them in foam and tried to use the the cabin of the truck to protect us from the wind um the real challenge was recording steady States out on a road so what we what we did we had this really skilled driver who went all up through the hills of marine Headlands and he knew exactly which road to be on to be the right gradient of Hill with the right amount of load on the engine and the right gear so that he could hold the truck really steady under load and let us get a a usable Loop and then we did the whole process Again by adding weight to the truck and he added the trailer um and with a truck the the one characteristic that I really wanted to capture is called the jake brake and it's um it's an exhaust system I don't know if you hear trucks go downhill and they kind of make that b sound that that some people don't like um that's a valve that uses the the truck's uh pressure to help slow it down and that was something we really wanted to capture and and use in the

game um I'd like to play you just a really quick sample of how our our final results of our trucks ended up in the game this this runs for about a minute a minute and a half [Music]

[Music] so so when it came to boats again that was an entirely different different process um we did a 3-day recording session to capture seven different boat engines and again early on in the process we didn't know exactly what the final art models would be but we knew we had to provide small fishing boats medium boats some sort of high-speed drug smuggling boat uh some sort of large police patrol or Coast Guard boat and and then the kind of Bayou swamp fan booat well what we found was that the the really small less than 10 horsepower

engines it's really easy to record them in a tank um we found that being out on the water wasn't so difficult for us to maintain steady RPM States um if you can go out on a smooth calm nice weather day that that really helps compared to choppy weather and uh one thing we learned was that the exhaust of most boats is submerged under the water so it really offers you nothing to record other than that slight kind of glug glug glug sound when you're at idol so what we decided to do was record a second pass of each boat on dry land and what you can do is connect you know the boats need water for cooling but you can connect a hose to the engine and then you can record a second pass to get that exhaust and get that really aggressive bite that we wanted from the boats and then we Blended those recordings together um what we decided to do was was take the engine covers off put the dpas under the engine you know we we knew that the blimps and shotgun mics were going to at some at some level they were going to work for low speeds and then at higher speeds they were going to become useless so having those DPA mics under the

engine covers we had a natural Windbreak and it didn't matter what speed what RPM we were at we knew we would get some some clean reliable recordings from them um I I had this growing concern that you know salt water and microphones don't mix and we could have very easily just destroyed all our gear in one day and we we knew everything was going to get really wet so I decided to go to one of those like fabric stores where they sell sewing material and I said do you guys sell anything any kind of waterproof fabric that I could buy and they said yeah sure this is our uh this is our baby diaper section you can have camouflage or you can have this and I thought about it for a while we went with the camouflage but um but we basically bought this fabric wrapped up the mics sprayed them with that Scotch Guard stuff that's great for your shoes um and made sure we kind of pointed the back of the mic into the wind and you know these things got soaked every single day but we were able to protect you know for for maybe $30 worth of extra materials we were able to protect our gear and not break anything so that

was really worthwhile and and then we used a contact mic uh on the hole of the boat to get all the thumps and bumps um what I'd like to show you is just a really quick video of the recording session and then one more quick video of how those boats ended up in game [Music] [Music]

ch [Music] [Music] [Music]

[Music] that was a really really fun day um here's a little quick sample of how some of those sounds got used in game uh what you'll hear is more of the water spray more of the thumps and bumps and and some of the different things things we did on the fan boat you'll hear that we added you know vibrations for router control all that kind of stuff so here's an example of how how our final boat audio ended up in game

[Music] [Applause] [Music]

[Applause] um some of the additional pieces that we added to the engine our designers wanted to uh add for induction superchargers and turbochargers and the difficult part about recording a supercharger is that the engine that is underneath it of course is going to be loud so we contacted a factory that makes supercharges down in Southern California and by total luck they have a completely soundproof room in their Factory where they spool these up on electric motors and test them and make sure that they they're working properly before they package them off to their customers it it was like couldn't have been more lucky with the conditions and they agreed to let us in there so we recorded that way uh the turbo was a little more difficult we couldn't find a similar

situation so it became a combination of real turbos um sound design uh and folley you know we used bul bearing keychains compressed air hospital defibrillators and all sorts of different things to make our turbo sounds um with the police sirens we we also had a real hard time finding a car with a 1960 siren it was it was early 60s where they started experimenting with electronic sirens and went away from the old rotating impeller type Sirens so we ended up going to eBay and just buying a siren and that's that's how we managed to capture that we we also found that a lot of the sounds from 1960s police siren is due to the police officers messing with the buttons and kind of moving the siren halfway between two different positions and kind of kind of messing with it that way so that's that was something we really wanted to capture and recreate uh brings me to tires this was also one of the most fun parts of the whole project for us um you know our goals were to capture a clean set of Tire sounds in isolation from an engine uh we wanted to capture multiple

different surfaces including a wet Road and then share that same recording across all vehicles in the game um you know the challenge really was preparation um you know we looked at a whole bunch of different options of how to do this you we knew that by using an electric car that would that would provide us a quiet engine and and you there was only really one model of electric car that had enough horsepower to do what we wanted um we looked at private racetracks runways uh commercial racetracks and for all different reasons it it wasn't really a great option for us you know some people declined to record with us uh there was a commercial racetrack really close to our office but they have a go-kart track and a drag racing strip and and we really couldn't get a a private quiet place to record um we could but it would have been really expensive to rent out the entire facility so what we settled on was Laguna sea Mazda Raceway down in Monteray it's about 2 hours south of here um the reason for Laguna sea was it was really reasonably priced um if I

want the racetrack it's about $155,000 a day but the skid pad area is only $1,000 per day it's a really safe place uh it's really away from any kind of main roads it's not accessible to the public and the skidpad area is enclosed and locked and again you know speaking with our legal team their rules were don't break the law uh be safe and responsible so that was kind of the Mandate that I took when I was looking for this recording session where we really locked out is that Laguna saer is on county-owned land and they have a noise ordinance where they're not allowed to reach a certain average noise level so the way they the way they counter that is they actually close a couple days per month and do no racing and that brings their average noise level down for the month um so to our luck they let us record on one of those no race days and we actually got the entire facility to ourself for $1,000 it it was really terrific um we hired their their lead driving instructor um to be our driver we had one technician to basically swap wheels on and off of the car uh you we

rented this car from a private uh private owner and you know we bought our own tires and wheels so that we weren't destroying his tires out on the track uh we had an ambulance on standby which is really an inexpensive thing to do um and we had myself and one other sound designer and one producer the whole session only ran one day um it was a really simple mic setup we we put four Labs underneath each wheel uh basically right at the at the very base there where you can kind of see the corner just before the wheels where we put our mics and then we used these camera tripods uh called a cam tree gripper which is basically this really flexible industrial suction Mount system to hang a couple of senheiser shotguns above the wheels um and then we would have the driver in the car one person in the car and then walkie-talkie communication to just let everyone know if everything's okay um what we decided to record was really steady driving in a straight line you know the kind of boring stuff was driving at 5 mph but we got this really nice grit from the tires um all the way up to about 70 we did light braking but

not actually skinning we did braking where we were skining um we drove around in circles and did you know light medium and heavy sideways drifting uh and then we got to do the really fun stuff which was you know pouring clouds of smoke off the car and getting the burnout sounds um two things that we learned uh in our research prior we we had to look at what type of tires to purchase and we spoke to some drifting professionals who told told us that basically if we went with kind of the cheaper Korean tires we were going to get the best sound out of them so that was great cuz it was cheap and it was what we wanted um and we also learned that the the temperature of a tire completely changes how it sounds and this was something we didn't realize till we're on the track and the driver was explaining it to us that that squealing sound that you get from a tire is actually when the rubber is cold and it's still making some grip and it's kind of losing its grip and making grip and that's what produces that squealing sound when a tire gets so hot that it's starting to melt and turn soft um that

sound disappears entirely and you get this really cool whizzing sound and we were kind of fascinated by this so we recorded it and I went back to our designers and said is there any chance that you are simulating temperature and he's like yeah of course um so we we put that into the game and and in our game as you're doing burnouts over time that sound will change based on the temperature that's simulated of the tire um and then we repeated the entire process we wet down the road did everything all over again uh did it on dirt and gravel and a grass Leaf combination um the two big challenges that we faced during this was uh as we started to get into the really high speed whipping around doing burnouts I was concerned that those suction mounts were going to fall off and you know with a mic cable connected the thing was going to swing around like a wrecking ball and Destroy This $140,000 car so I made a decision at some point to take those mics off and just go with the labs under the wheels and I was a little disappointed because they they really were the two best mics we had but um in the nature of protecting and

respecting this person's property we decided to not do that um the other Big Challenge we had is traction control um this is a modern computer controlled electric car it even when you turn the traction control off it still has a number of systems involved that are trying to save your life and so if you were sliding out of control it shuts the power down to the engine and it was really restricting our driver from doing what he wanted to do um we knew about this early on and luckily I had a friend that works at this company and he told me which fuses and reays to pull out and rearrange to fool the car into doing what we wanted it to do so we got we kind of locked out there but but again this came down to preparation you know we planned this session 3 months in advance so you know I had maybe 50 conversations with this engineer about everything I could learn about this car about what it would do what it wouldn't do and what my limitations were going to be um I'll show you a real quick video of how some of those recording sessions went

I'm going to play this back just a little quieter just to kind of protect everyone's ears by the nature of this how obnoxious this type of sound can be [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] f

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] it was a really fun day we were really happy with the results everything turned out exactly as we' planned um what I'd like to do is show you a really quick sample of how that sounds in game uh with everything that we did after after the fact um what you're going to hear in this video is just the road sounds everything else has been disabled it's just purely the tires and I forgot to mention um if if the surrounds are

working in here what you're hearing in the quad speakers right now is a representation of each wheel in the game each wheel on your car [Music] I [Applause] [Applause] [Applause]

[Applause] I don't know if you guys noticed the uh the the whizzing sound that kind of comes in and out at different times and uh the way we did the the driving on the rims um I actually took a jack stand and just connect Ed a contact mic to it and then pointed one other shotgun mic at it and just rubbed it on the concrete and I was able to kind of create the loops that I wanted of different intensities and different speeds and kind of jiggled it on concrete and that was that was a way to come up with that sound um when it came time to implementation you know we were kind of at this real Crossroads do we go with a loop based system uh granular synthesis is a really popular method that a lot of people are choosing um we evaluated granular synthesis and there there was an off the-shelf product we could buy and there was some things we liked about it and some things we didn't like about it um I didn't have the engineering

resources to go and create our own brand new granular synthesis system so we ended up deciding to go with a very fine detailed Loop base system for this game um that doesn't mean we won't evaluate that method again in future and and we are evaluating that for future but for this game we decided to go with a really fine detailed Loop um again we were doing 200 RPM increments from idle to 2,000 and then 500 RPM increments up to Red Line um then we built everything we needed inside of wise with switches and blend containers and rtpc um we ended up mixing everything down to a stereo engine a stereo exhaust and it turned out the interior perspective camera angle was going to be cut from the game but at the time of recording we didn't know that so we captured it anyway um we decided to keep the players car completely 2D even though it's a third person game and the car is kind of out there in front of you uh you know the camera moves around a lot the car is spinning around a lot our our camera had this really kind of chasing Dutch tilt

kind of system going on and it was really kind of distracting for the player to hear their Engine moving around so much so we decided to keep everything in 2D and then completely change the mix State uh based on the camera angle that the player chose um 3D cars of course were sorry NPC cars were of course 3D and we had the original goal of keeping them just as High Fidelity as everything else and again reality set in that we couldn't do that so we ended up having to optimize them and ship them with a mono single and engine exhaust combination um you know we had some performance concerns and it was really more important to me to hear more cars at once on the road in a traffic situation than to just have two or three cars sound as high as Fidelity as possible so that was one of our limitations um with tires we did uh we shared those recordings we did a slight pitch shift based on the size of the car so trucks we would pitch down and get a deeper howl and we'd pitch up for small cars um each wheel was tracked independently in the game so each wheel plays the appropriate surface that you're on and then for NPCs we optimized

by playing just the one wheel closest to you and that was that was plenty um we were really lucky in that our design and engineering team made this really amazing physics based driving model that was built upon from Mafia 2 and so we had access to a huge wealth of information um you know I won't go through every single one in detail but the couple that I'll call out was uh we were able to do the jake brake on the truck by knowing the engine load the clutch position and the angle if the truck was only pointing its nose downhill and so that allowed us to do everything we wanted to inside of wise um Tire rotational speed was a really important thing too if if the wheel was spinning uh at a slower rotational speed relative to what it should be going for the vehicle speed then we knew we were skiding to a halt if it was running at a higher rotational speed we knew we were doing a burnout and of course if it was drifting sideways we had that information as well so what you can see there is a series of blend container containers nested inside of other blend containers and using some rpcs we were

able to build all of our drif in and burnouts and tire temperature simulation all inside of wise um and then in closing I'd like to show you just a really quick clip of uh kind of everything culminated together um this is kind of the best driving experience that we strived for and what we thought we could deliver in Mafia 3 so I hope you enjoy this oh [Music] [Music] [Music]

[Applause] [Music] [Music] oh oh [Music] [Music]

[Applause] w [Music] [Applause] [Music] he [Music]

so thank you all for coming I really appreciate you taking the time to get up here um particularly early on a Friday morning um hope you enjoyed that I hope you kind of learned something about the process of recording Cars um we have a little bit of time left so if anyone would like to ask questions um feel free to come up to the microphone up in front hi hi uh great talk um I was just curious about the with the tire recording session what what was the tape for around the um like around the tires it looked like it appeared to be tape that was two purposes uh one was to tape the mic cables down and the other was just as Stone protection um you know the the technician we worked with particularly it's blue painters tape

which doesn't leave any kind of glued residue behind because we were conscious of not damaging the paint um but he basically said you know if we tape up certain areas of the car that's this is where all the stone chips are going to come from this is where all the dirt's going to get kicked up so particularly when we recorded on the gravel road that was something we wanted to do to just protect the car but it also served as taping down mic cables awesome thank you yeah thanks um when recording these cars on a dynapack for instance did you have to have a hub adapters made for some of the cars for like the bolt patterns to get them to match up uh so the workshop had uh standard four and five bolt patterns and those adapters are adjustable for certain widths um we did have a special Volkswagen adapter made um but it turned out we weren't permitted to use Volkswagen recordings so we had to throw that away right um there are some Brands out there that trademark their sound so we we learned over time there were certain cars we couldn't use um and then it was really just that McLaren that we had the special adapter made but um but everything else we searched for cars

that fit that that particular bolt pattern and then sometimes we would unfortunately have to turn down cars if they weren't going to fit yeah yeah sorry I have a question as well hi um so you said that you recorded 30 different vehicles but you used 90 in the game were you like mixing and matching sounds of from different recordings a little bit a little bit mostly it was just we we just shared those recordings across the 90 so you just had like 30 like archetypes for vehicles and then pretty much yeah and then we would choose what we thought sounded the best or most appropriate based on you know the designers were tweaking what the performance of that car was going or virtual performance of that car was going to be so we would choose what we thought sounded the best cool thank you thanks during the recording session uh out on the track um what did you use in terms of multitrack and um like 64 GB cards you just press

record and just record all day long or uh for the tires yeah um we had a sound devices 788t and we had one person sitting in the passenger seat recording so we would um we would use uh radio communication to talk back to our producer and tell her this is what Maneuvers we're about to do next and then she would note note that and we we' talk time code back and forth across the the radio um and you know if we were forgetting something she would say say look on your list you've got these three more things you haven't done yet and so we were just communicating over over radio that way the radio was really mainly meant to be a safety feature you know if something caught on fire or fell off we would have someone tell us but it also served as a way to kind of prompt us of what to do for whoever was sitting in the car itself yeah cool well thank you everyone for coming um enjoy the rest of your GDC um really appreciate you taking the time to be here for