Hello Guys,
sorry for the very noob question but I missed a couple of versions of FMOD and now I found that Events can be either Actions or Timelines. I searched on the manual but I couldn’t find any explanation. The differences seem pretty obvious and I might know the answer but I’d like more details and informations from the PRO.
Thanks and have a nice day,
Iain
There’s still only one kind of event. The different context menu items just determine what sheet types the newly created event initially contains: The “New 2D Action” and “New 3D Action” menu items both create an event that contains an action sheet but no timeline sheet, and the “New 2D Timeline” and “New 3D Timeline” menu items both create an event that contains a timeline but no action sheet.
You could select “New 2D Action,” then select the new event, add a timeline sheet, and delete its action sheet, and the result would be identical to if you had selected “New 2D Timeline” in the first place.
It looks like the version of the manual on this website is slightly out of date, and doesn’t include some recently-added information. I’ll see about uploading a more recent version.
In the mean time, you can find a more recent version of the FMOD Studio manual by selecting “Help > User Manual” in FMOD Studio. This version of the manual is specific to the version of Studio you have installed. You’ll find the differences between the various new event menu items in the Key Event Concepts section of the Authoring Events chapter of copy of the FMOD Studio manual that ships with FMOD Studio.
+1 to the question. It’s not very clear what is the purpose of the action sheets.
An action would be an equivalent of a sfx that can transition to another sfx through a transition region for example? Instead of doing that, you can get a more instantaneous response from Fmod in an action sheet?
Action sheets are designed to simplify creating a specific common type of event that appears in most FMOD Studio projects.
Timeline sheets allow you to make events that react to, or manipulate, the passage of time; and parameter sheets allow you to make events with complex behavior that changes depending on the game’s state. Those are both useful, but most games feature a vast number of events don’t do anything special with time, and don’t react to the game’s state after being triggered; they just do something fairly simple and specific when triggered. For those events, we have action sheets.
Allright, but then, what would the difference between a oneshot and an action sheet be? Could I ask for a concrete example of why I’d use an action sheet over a timeline, or why is it more comfortable?
Why would I want “consecutive” sounds? I don’t want it to sound like a complain, but from what I understand it’s like having a timeline but I don’t know how much the event lasts neither when a sound from the chain will actually trigger besides “after X number of sounds”.
A oneshot is an event that plays once then ends.
An action sheet is a component of an event that allows you to define a list of instruments that the event should play when started.
A oneshot event can potentially include an action sheet, but you can easily make a oneshot event that has no action sheet, and can use action sheets in non-oneshot events.
Action sheets are simpler to set up, as you don’t have to worry about where exactly you position each instrument on the timeline.
Consecutive sounds allow you to play one instrument immediately after another.
You can do this on the timeline, but only if you know how long each individual instrument is going to play for. If any instrument could play for a variable amount of time (perhaps because it has a random modulator on its pitch property or is a multi instrument whose playlist entries have different lengths), predicting the length of time that it will play for becomes impossible, making it impossible to position the next instrument on the timeline such that it reliably begins playing immediately when the previous instrument ends.
That being said, you don’t need action sheets for anything. Eveything that can be done with an action sheet can also be done by other means. Action sheets are, however, slightly quicker and simpler to use than those other means in many cases, making them the quicker and easier option.
Wow! Thanks for all the explanations! I was looking on a wrong page of the Manual but your answers made everything clear!
Have a nice day