Building metadata bank without building audio file bank?

FMOD Studio
1

Hi,

I’m working on updates for a game that’s already shipped and I’m trying to keep our banks as small as possible. Therefore, for every update, I create a new bank and put all new events in there and only allow that new bank to be built.

The problem I’m running into is what to do with metadata tweaks I want to make to old events (e.g. Volume, Max Instances or Cooldown adjustments). These events are present in banks that shipped a long time ago, so now I don’t want to ever build those .asset.bank files again. Is there a way to just build the .bank file and exclude the .assets.bank file (assuming metadata like Max Instances is present in the .bank file)?

I should mention that we had to update FMOD at some point after shipping (for console SDK and Unity reasons), so the original launch banks are built with an older version of FMOD, and the current version of FMOD that we’re using (2.01.09) wants to rebuild those .asset.bank files (i.e. it won’t conclude that nothing has changed in the wav files and leave the .asset.bank files as-is).

Other than being able to just build the .bank files, are there other options? My last resort is to create a copy of the old events I want to change and put them in the new bank?

I’m also curious if there are any best practices wrt banks and planning ahead for keeping post-launch updates small (for frequently updated games)?

Thanks,
Sean

2

Have you tried using the new metadata banks with the existing asset banks? Our bank format doesn’t usually change within a major version, so if your asset banks were originally built with any version of FMOD Studio between 2.01.00 and 2.01.11, they should be compatible with metadata banks built by version 2.01.09.

This feature exists specifically to allow developers to ship a new version of their metadata banks without needing to include their asset banks in the download.

You’re already doing the main best practices: Putting new content in new banks, and keeping your sample data and metadata in separate banks so that you can update the latter without needing to issue a new version of the former.

Some developers also like to divide their events up in to a very large number of banks, so that they can minimize the required download size when they do need to update an event’s sample data. Of course, because each bank includes a small amount of overhead, it’s not appropriate for all projects.

3

Thanks a lot, Joseph. I tried this today and it seems to be working nicely :+1:. Is the best way to go about this to build as usual, and then replace the .assets.bank files with the old ones? Or is there a way to have FMOD only build the metadata banks?

And thanks for confirming about our overall process for handling updates.

Sean

4

I don’t know how your release process makes use of the bank files, so I can’t say whether this will be necessary.

As of the time of writing (August of 2021), there is no way to have FMOD Studio build just the metadata banks.

5

Thanks, Joseph. We use SVN for our repositories. So what I did was build as usual, delete the unwanted .assets.bank file(s) and then update SVN to have it pull/replace the deleted bank with the older one.