STISIM Drive - Volume Control

One of the most important cues that a driver uses is auditory. Therefore we have provided several different sound effects that can be used during a simulation run. All of these sound effects are stored as WAV files and are played at specific times during the simulation run. Because these are sound effects the volume that is used to present the effects is very important. Not only is this important for the sound effect files that we provide but also for sound effect files that you create and use with the play recording (PR) event.

There are a couple of ways to increase/decrease the volume of the sound effects. The easiest are:

1. Adjust the volume of the speakers that you are using (assuming they are amplified and have a volume control.
2. Use a Windows based utility to adjust the sound that the sound card produces.

In general these changes work fine for overall adjustments of the sound such as it being to loud or not loud enough, however, this assumes that all of the recordings were recorded at about the same volume level and that you want all of the recordings played at the same volume. If you need to play your recordings at different volume levels it becomes a little more difficult. For example, you may need to give the driver some auditory instructions and you want to make sure that they are heard over the engine noise. Even in this case you have a couple of options:

1. Use a commercially available software package that allows you to amplify the recordings (if you are making recordings yourself you probably already have the software).
2. Use the STISIM Drive volume control.

Option 1 is a good place to start. If you make solid recordings that have a strong signal and good volume it makes this process a lot easier. If you will be doing a lot of recording, you should try and record all of the files at approximately the same internal volume levels. This will provide you with the most flexibility when you incorporate the sound into the simulation run. Then you can use the STISIM Drive volume control to fine tune the playback so that all of your effects are presented correctly.

Basically, the STISIM Drive volume control lets you specify the gain on the sound effects that will be played. In the Sound configuration tab box, there is a slider bar for each sound effect that STISIM Drive supports. The slider bar goes from 0 to 10, and only increments in steps of 1, thus providing you with 11 different settings that the sound effects can be played back at. As you would expect 0 is the minimum volume and 10 is maximum volume. As you would not expect, setting the volume slider to 0 provides the minimum volume and does not the volume off altogether. To turn off the effects, you will have to disable the effect using one of the other options. As a general rule, it is probably best to set the engine volume lower than 10. Since this is basically going all of the time you will want to make sure that other recordings can be easily heard over the engine, therefore a lower value is best to use. You can always use the volume knob to boost the volume of the overall system.

The configuration sound tab is not the only place within STISIM Drive that you can control volume. There are a handful of events in the SDL that have sound files associated with them. In each of these cases there is a volume control parameter that can be used to amplify the sound associated with the event. Like the slider control that was discussed previously, the volume range for each SDL event is between 0 and 10 with 0 providing the minimum volume and 10 the maximum. Unlike the slider control that only provides 11 settings, within the SDL you have much finer control over the volume. The volume control parameters can be specified using decimals so a value of 3.14 is acceptable and will increase the volume over a value of 3.13, although you probably won't be able to discern any perceptible change. One final note, if the volume control parameter is left blank, then the maximum volume will be used.

In all cases, the volume that is specified is a relative volume. Since the overall sound level can be manipulated in other ways (amplifiers, etc.), the volume control tries to set a relative volume between the various sound effects. If all of the sound effects were recorded at the same volume and then you played one back with a volume of 6 and one back with a volume of 7, the one with the volume of 7 would be louder. However, if the files are recorded at distinctly different volume levels, then a volume of 6 on one file still may be louder than a volume of 7 on another. Therefore you should never assume that a higher volume setting will produce a louder effect, you will always need to make sure this is indeed the case.