Simulating an Entire Car Engine (yes, it makes noise)

What Hacker News said

Strong rec mhink · 2025-07 · on “Programming vehicles in games”

> Interestingly, while the engine has the most moving parts in real life, in code, it's the simplest piece of the entire car simulation. Because at its core, the engine is just a torque calculator. It's concerned with producing a single output: rotational torque, from a set of inputs. It is essentially a blackbox. This just reminded me of AngeTheGreat's incredible video series showing his engine simulator- absolutely worth checking out, considering it's optimized enough to run in real-time! The fact that he's simulating it well enough to generate realistic sound is absolutely mind-blowing. [this video]

Recommends Fr0styMatt88 · 2023-01 · on “Ultibo – Bare-Metal Pascal for Raspberry Pi”

Or combine it with that engine noise generator that uses a full physical simulation: [this video] That would be pretty sweet! I’m guessing with the ECU sensors you could do away with much of the sim parts.

Recommends pengaru · 2023-12 · on “Dynamic music and sound techniques for video games”

You might find this software interesting: [this video] I don't know if any of the state of the art flight/driving simulators are doing this kind of engine noise synthesis already, but they should be.

Recommends modeless · 2025-05 · on “Show HN: I built a synthesizer based on 3D physics”

Love physics based audio! Using the GPU is a great idea. Another physical audio simulation I like is the engine sound simulator made by AngeTheGreat: [this video]

Cites blahburn · 2024-01 · on “Organ pipe physics”

Would love to play around with this and hear the differences in sound. Something like what this guy did with the engine simulator [this video]