Hey everyone,
I have a gunshot sound effect that uses a base and tail for an inside and outside version, so four in total.
When I shoot, even though only one event is played, the total channels rise to four and the real channel stays at one. This leads to astronomical amounts of channels when firing even a few times.
Besides combining the tail and gunshot sound, what is there that I can can do to only play the two channels that are actually used? Should I use seperate events for the interior and exterior version, or is there some kind of feature that prevents sounds from playing if they have a volume of minus infinity? I’m using Unity by the way, if that’s of any importance.
Please let me know, thanks.
First off, if you’re going to keep the event set up like it is, with the shot and the tail both spatialized, you might want to drastically shorten your “direct” sound. It doesn’t need to be long at all if you’ve got that tail. That will cut down on voices. Might even just combine them into one audio file.
But I might recommend setting it all up differently. I’d not spatialize the tails. It’s basically a reverb. If you do this, keep the full length of the direct spatialized shot, to maintain its localization throughout the length of the tail. It will sound fuller if you keep the stereo image of the tail intact. If you put the tails in a separate event, you can limit their voices. Once 3 tails build up, you won’t notice one of them getting killed when a 4th one starts up.
You’ll still need to work out the switching between the inside and outside versions, but that’s easy with a parameter and conditions.
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Believe it or not, this is already happening automatically.
A “virtual” channel is a channel that isn’t actually playing; FMOD is just keeping track of the fact that it could be playing, in case it needs to start. As long as it remains virtual, it doesn’t get included in the mix and doesn’t consume resources. When you say there’s four total channels but only one real channel, that’s because the remaining three channels are virtual.
Yes! This feature exists, and is enabled by default. We call it VOL0 Virtual. As the name suggests, it automatically virtualizes channels whose volume is below a certain threshold - a threshold that is by default very close to -oo dB.
I imagine vol0virtual is the reason why your silenced audio tracks are being virtualized.
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