Engine Sound Tune-up

gecko

gecko

Charter Member
Just came across a tweak for setting up engine sounds for particular aircraft. Say you found a new sound set for a plane but when you install it, the engine never sounds like it reaches full power, even with your, prop, throttle and mixture at 100% and flying on the deck. Or perhaps the sound reaches full power sooner than it should, say 80% throttle.

Solution: open your the aircraft.cfg of the aircraft in question, and find the max horsepower value in the piston_engine section. If your sound is not reaching full power, adjust the horsepower value down and test. If you're reaching full power sound too early, adjust the value up and test.

I have checked and this value does not affect the performance of your aircraft at all, it exists only for the sound cfg to know when to play the full power sounds and sets the scale for lower power sounds from there.

I hope this is useful information for everyone. Have fun!

Daniel
 
Talking of engine sounds, I assume all modders go to a lot of trouble to get genuine sounds...as heard from outside the ac. If I am right, the sounds are not those one would hear inside the ac, let alone with headphones. Now if such sounds were available, I suppose there would have to be both external and internal engine sounds.
 
Most do have internal sounds of some kind that usually seem pretty good. Most of the ones I use were made for FS9, really nice.
 
gecko said:
Most do have internal sounds of some kind that usually seem pretty good. Most of the ones I use were made for FS9, really nice.
Click to expand...

So the ETO and MAW ones you reckon are internal? I suppose they might be if no head phones?
 
Usually a sound set has both, accuracy depends on what the author was able to find/record, which can be pretty challenging for some of these obscure engines. In my experience, headphones on in the cockpit does little more than reduce volume unless they're noise canceling which I don't think were in use in wwii. This is easy to replicate by simply making sure you can hear radio sounds above the engine and the engine above pretty much everything else.
 
gecko said:
Just came across a tweak for setting up engine sounds for particular aircraft. Say you found a new sound set for a plane but when you install it, the engine never sounds like it reaches full power, even with your, prop, throttle and mixture at 100% and flying on the deck. Or perhaps the sound reaches full power sooner than it should, say 80% throttle.

Solution: open your the aircraft.cfg of the aircraft in question, and find the max horsepower value in the piston_engine section. If your sound is not reaching full power, adjust the horsepower value down and test. If you're reaching full power sound too early, adjust the value up and test.

I have checked and this value does not affect the performance of your aircraft at all, it exists only for the sound cfg to know when to play the full power sounds and sets the scale for lower power sounds from there.

I hope this is useful information for everyone. Have fun!

Daniel
Click to expand...
Oh my god, that is awesome! I've always wondered about this...this is gold in my opinion! Thank you!
 
gecko said:
Solution: open your the aircraft.cfg of the aircraft in question, and find the max horsepower value in the piston_engine section. If your sound is not reaching full power, adjust the horsepower value down and test. If you're reaching full power sound too early, adjust the value up and test.

Daniel
Click to expand...

gecko,

Not all airfiles for aircraft have the horsepower in them,so the plane will use the cfg file for the horsepower.If you change it you might change the horsepower for that plane.I found this out by checking airfiles for certain planes.Examples are the P51 and P 40,they use the cfg file because there is no piston engine entry in the airfile.
 
As far as I know, very few CFS3 aircraft have the HP value in the air file and all have the aircraft cfg value. Changing the aircraft cfg value doesn't seem to affect performance - I tried entering a value of 5 and then 5000, with no change in performance either time vs the stock value. I'm pretty sure the other values in the piston engine section are what actually control performance, as actual HP is controlled directly by engine displacement, rpm and manifold pressure (all in the aircraft cfg) and friction loss (found in the air file).
 
gecko said:
As far as I know, very few CFS3 aircraft have the HP value in the air file and all have the aircraft cfg value. Changing the aircraft cfg value doesn't seem to affect performance - I tried entering a value of 5 and then 5000, with no change in performance either time vs the stock value. I'm pretty sure the other values in the piston engine section are what actually control performance, as actual HP is controlled directly by engine displacement, rpm and manifold pressure (all in the aircraft cfg) and friction loss (found in the air file).
Click to expand...
That's been my observation also. I just figured the Max_hp in cfg file was useless. Now i get to see what it does. I always wondered why my 2400hp Tempest sounded like it was at barely half throttle.

I'm curious though, does the engine displacement, rpm and manifold pressure (all in the aircraft cfg) have an effect on the sound too? I usually adjust that to get the last mph adjusted out of my planes to correct top speeds.
 
Daniel, you might want to cc this to the sticky project knowlege base; along with all your other insights! :applause:
 
Well there was pilots constants, specular stuff, just to mention a couple! :icon_lol:
EDIT: see shining already there!
 
I put everything I know about specular stuff into a tutorial that is uploaded into the cfs3 utillities section. I don't know what I know about pilot constants, it seems very inconsistent to me, can't get reliable results.
 
Ok but while you are here, re ENB Series graphics enhancements as yr "NEW CFS3 Environment", that link seems for DX8 so still valid for Win7 pro?
 
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