While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.
Major auto manufacturers undoubtedly rely on programs that can take in many advanced engine parameters and spit out perfect simulations of how much power that engine would theoretically provide. And, certainly, those programs require the time and expense of a massive team of programmers working in advanced, specialized coding languages. AngeTheGreat, on the other hand, just wanted to know why video game developers never bothered to accurately simulate engine sounds in racing games, so he decided to build his own simulator in C++ that, with some simple inputs and some audio tweaking, rather accurately creates the sound of whatever engine one can dream up.
Here's the thing, though: While he calls his Engine Simulator "quite possibly the dumbest project I've ever undertaken," (he also created his own 3D ray-tracing program for modeling cars) it also happens to closely predict horsepower and torque ratings, and it appears he's also using it to model volumetric efficiency. And it sounds like he did it in just a couple of months. And he's made it free for anybody to use.
That last aspect — and the fact that one can specify just about any engine layout or displacement (inline-7, V-22, 1300 liters) — has inspired many YouTubers over the last month or so to start playing with the simulator to model some bizarre and curious hypothetical engines. We imagine more will come too, so if you're handy in C++ and have ever wondered what some weird engine configuration sounds like, let us know how your models turn out.
