The game that I am creating contains wheels that are rolled around in 3D based on player input. Each player has their own wheel. I would like players to be able to hear the wheel rolling.

I've tried playing a repeating sound through XACT and adjusting the pitch based on the speed of the wheel, but that does not seem like the right approach. I also thought about creating a non-repeating sound that would be queued every time that the wheel rolls a certain distance but that would result in the sound being played many times at once as the wheel rolls faster and I'm not sure how that would perform. I would probably want to adjust the volume and/or pitch as well.

There is an Arcade game that has a similar sound of a marble rolling around. I'm not sure how they implemented that, but if you've seen that game then you have an idea of what I'm trying to do.

Could someone point me to a resource that describes how to solve this kind of problem? Thank you.

JerryCode:

I've tried playing a repeating sound through XACT and adjusting the pitch based on the speed of the wheel, but that does not seem like the right approach.

I dunno, that seems like a reasonable approach to me.

You could also fade between different versions of the sound (if you have "slow", "medium" and "fast" recordings, say), based on a variable. (I think XACT allows you do to that).

I've tried twice to use a repeating sound, but it is hard to get it to sync with when the wheel stops. The sound tends to end abruptly.

Yes, you should pitch up and down. You probably don't want to pitch up and down as much as the velocity varies, though, because while more physically accurate, the formant shifts will sound really weird. In GS 3.1, we get XACT 3, which has some filtering built-in, which may allow you to affect the formants a bit as you shift, which would help.
Also, it's a good idea to fade between at least two sounds (slow and fast), because slow sounds are dominated by the grit of the sand/surface that the wheel is rolling over, whereas fast sounds are more dominated by the rumble and noise of traction. You can combine pitch shifting and fading in XACT if you want, and you can pitch different sub-sounds differently based on the velocity.
In general, good sound effects for vehicles is fairly intricate, and something that sound designers spend a lot of time on, using many different component sound parts that get blended together at runtime to get the in-game sound.

Thanks for the responses. I think I have been pitching up and down too fast. I hadn't heard of formant shifts before so I'll learn about them. I don't mind spending some time to get this working as long as I know the general approach to use. I figured that it wouldn't be easy. Maybe this is something that I'll put some time into after getting other aspects of the game working well because I don't want to delay my progress at this point.

Thanks!

Any luck with this?  I saw a presentation on 'The Simpsons Game' last year.  In it, Homer, rolls around in ball form, crashing into things.  They used many variables to determin "rolling":
1) How fast is the ball spinning? 2) How fast moving? 3) Was ball rolling in same direction as motion?
For the actual rolling sounds though, they used many many small samples of real rolling.