Ephera , 4 days ago

It’s certainly simpler than Forza et al, but there’s an open-source racing simulator, called Speed Dreams: www.speed-dreams.net
If you watch the “Latest Release” video, there’s some engine sounds in that.

They seem to have a bunch of samples for how different car models’ engines sound: sourceforge.net/p/speed-dreams/code/…/sound/

And then they modulate that in code, based on the car’s speed, gear, turbo etc.:
sourceforge.net/p/…/CarSoundData.cpp#l171

They also do that for gear changes, tyre sounds, collisions and backfires.

From what I know about audio, I would expect AAA games to still use the same approach of recordings+modulations.
While it is possible to fully synthesize an engine sound, it doesn’t help you much with making it sound right in all different situations.