Hello,
I am working as part of a somewhat small project (sound team is just 2). It has been requested from our developers that we begin using our Soundbanks as addressables. I have read through the documentation on addressables with FMOD but much of the terminology is a little alien to me as a sound designer.
Development have told me that this is so we can add assets to the game without needing to update code. Am I correct in thinking I could add new audio/update banks then without us requiring a game update?
A couple of things stood out to me:
AssetBundles and Addressables require your FMOD Banks to be imported as TextAssets.
Loading a .bank file from a TextAsset keeps the entire resource in memory, which may be expensive.
Do either of these things affect the sound designer’s workflow in any way, or are these things purely problems for a Unity programmer to solve?
Apologies for the somewhat naive questions, but our team lacks a technical sound designer/audio programmer so I just need a bit of advice.
We are using FMOD 2.02.11 and Unity 2021.3.9f1
Thanks in advance!
Hi,
No need to apologize, it is a great question.
In terms of FMOD Studio, there will be no changes. Your workflow for creating new events and building banks will remain the same, it is mainly how Banks are loaded and unloaded asynchronously and there need to be more checks to ensure Banks are loaded before Events are played (FMOD Unity | User Guide). So if you are primarily working in FMOD Studio you will not notice anything.
Hope this helps! If you have any more questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
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Thank you so much for the response!
Does this, in theory, meet the need that we could add new sounds to the game and rebuild soundbanks without updating the game code (requiring a game update)?
Or is there not enough information there to know that?
As you have to specify which banks to load, unlike when using streaming assets, there would have to be code updates to include any new Banks (Unity Integration | User Guide). Events would be the same, if they are added at a later date there would be code or Emitters added to trigger them.
Thank you, I will discuss this with the Unity team and come back with any further questions.
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