Feature Request: Faster Seek Speeds

FMOD Studio
1

Hello,

I’m looking for seek speeds that are slower than instant but faster than the current max speed (5/sec on a 0-1 param). This is to alleviate some binary behavior but still have very quick seek speeds.

Is there a reason there’s a cap?

Thanks!

2

FMOD operates with an internal frame rate that usually matches the game’s rate (but it can be set to be higher through the API). A faster seek would still quantize to frames so you can’t get rid of snaps completely.

3

Yup, there’s definitely constraints to work within concerning the framerate. With a 0-1 parameter set to the max seek speed (5 units/Second) the fastest time to move from 0 to 1 would be 200ms. Would love to be able to reduce this significantly.

4

One possible solution, if you have that option (programmer support) available, is to set the seek to instant, but interpolate the parameter on the game code side. Our in-house game engine can be set to do that on a per parameter basis.

5

Whilst increasing the speed is certainly possible, it would be good to know why you need something to be faster than 200ms but slower than instant. Could you give an example of where you would use this?

As mentioned, the current workaround would be for you to create a function to drive the parameter value yourself.

6

Thanks for the reply Richard.

For our case, we have a parameter on events that can either be driven by the player’s actions or AI. Unfortunately, the AI behavior is very binary, so I want to add smoothing to the parameter; just enough to keep the automation changes on the parameter from clicking as the AI modulated the value from 0-1. Additionally, the seek speed needs to be fast enough that there is no apparent lag when the parameter is being modulated by player input (which would never be instant, but can still be pretty dang quick).

Unfortunately, getting the dev support for these types of asks isn’ always in the question, which is why providing the audio designer with a wide range of functionality in the FMOD toolset is what makes FMOD great!

Thanks for your help in the request!
-Todd

7

Thanks for the information. I’ve added a feature request to our tracker and we’ll take a look into it for a future release.