DLC for Unity mobile App

#1

Hello, I’m developing sound for a mobile app using FMOD Studio 1.10.18 + Unity integration
What’s the best way to create DLC contents (of course I’m focused on audio contents) for an alreasy released unity app?
I wish to add downloaded banks and events on top of an existing build, so the additional code can call them, but don’t know exactly how to keep the original FMOD project having the new banks and event structure side-loaded and working on top of it
Best practices to achieve this ?
Thanks

#2

It’s described in the documentation here: https://www.fmod.com/resources/documentation-studio?version=2.0&page=supporting-downloadable-and-user-generated-content.html#creating-dlc

Haven’t distributed a DLC before, but essentially, it seems pretty easy:

  • Create the new Events in the original FMOD project and assign them to new banks.
  • Build the project and distribute the banks as part of your DLC.

Stuff to keep in mind:

  • If you are adding or editing busses you have to also distribute the new master bank.
  • If you want to call your events by name and not by GUID in the code, also update the strings.bank file, which is automatically created when building.
#3

Sounds really easy and smooth, thanks for your reply!
But I also have another scenario that could be more tricky:
I have weapon sounds: some soundevents in the “main” app controlled by a sound parameter to select the correct Weapon type (ex: 1-10)
What if my DLC will add new weapons? Maybe I could reference empty soundevents into the main Weapon events for “future expansion” contained in specific expasion -empty- Soundbanks? (I could then replace those fake soundbanks to fill them with the real DLC soundevents)
Or maybe using Programmer sound?
Is there an easy way to manage this?
Thanks!

#4

If I understand it right you have individual weapon events that are referenced inside a “main” weapon event? FMOD assigns referenced events to the parent’s bank by default as seen here: https://fmod.com/resources/documentation-studio?version=2.0&page=getting-events-into-your-game.html#including-referenced-events-in-banks

You would have a few ways to handle this:

  1. Create new weapon events and reference them in the main weapon event. Assign the main weapon event to a new bank. Player’s without the DLC will load the old bank, with DLC you can load the new bank with the main event instead.

  2. Do the same as above but instead of assigning the main weapon event to a new bank, assign it to the already existing bank. You will just overwrite the old bank with the weapon DLC bank. The advantage of doing this is your game size will be a bit smaller.

  3. The more complex option that will maybe save some asset space is to disable the Inlude referenced events in banks option, assign the already existing individual referenced weapon events to a separate “non-dlc” bank, push an update to your game including this bank (probably not possible). For the DLC create new weapon events and this time assign them to a new “dlc” bank, also edit your main weapon event, include the referenced events and assign it to a new or existing bank. In this case you are only adding the new weapon sounds to the dlc bank, instead of including all referenced events in the new bank again.

I think all methods would work without needing to create empty placeholder events as you suggested. Maybe someone in the community or the FMOD team can give you more hands-on insight in this, I’m only interpreting the documentation I’m not 100% sure I’m right. Haven’t got the chance to test this yet.