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Frame from Simulating an Entire Car Engine (yes, it makes noise) Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

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

AngeTheGreat
Demos
YouTube
4 HN users recommended this demo4 months2023–2025 score 4.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN points to it as a standout example of physics-based sound synthesis and engine simulation.

AngeTheGreat describes building a physically realistic internal combustion engine simulator in C++, drawing on fluid dynamics, physics and chemistry. It generates procedural audio for engines such as a V8.

“AngeTheGreat's incredible video series showing his engine simulator- absolutely worth checking out” (HN, 2025)

1 strong recommendations · 3 recommendations · 1 citations · Demos · intermediate

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@mhink Jul 2025 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Programming vehicles in games
Read more
> 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]
Real-time engine simulation generating realistic sound
@Fr0styMatt88 Jan 2023 Recommends
on HN thread 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.
Full physical engine simulation that generates engine noise
@pengaru Dec 2023 Recommends
on HN thread 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.
Engine noise synthesis software

Citations, criticism and jokes

@blahburn Jan 2024 Cites it
on HN thread 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]
Example of physics-based engine sound simulation

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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