i’m writing some documentation for an online class using FMOD Studio that will be going live in February, and i was trying to demonstrate the concept of Max voices and Voice Stealing. it may be that i don’t understand the concept, but in my mind, if i were to set Max voices to an event at 1 and turn on Voice Stealing and repeatedly trigger the event i get two behaviors:
in timeline all voices playing are interrupted when retriggering the sound regardless of Polyphony or Voice Stealing settings.
using a parameter, the sound can be repeatedly instanced and triggered, but i can’t get it to play one sound only and interrupt even with Max Voices at 1 and Voice stealing on.
are either or both of these normal behavior or is there an issue?
Thanks for feedback. The Polyphony properties within the Event Macros actually refers to instancing controls for an event. Say, for example, I had an event that represented the footstep sounds for an enemy player. If many enemies surrounded me, there may be an influx of audible footstep events. At this point, you may want to limit the number of audible footstep events. In this case, you could set the Max Voices property so that only a certain number of instances of the footstep event would be heard at any given time. The Voice Stealing property is what is used to determine what happens when the Max Voices limit is met. If Voice Stealing is on, the most audible event instances will be played and others will be virtualized (updated but not made audible). If Voice Stealing is off, no new event instances will be triggered once Max Voices is met.
The behavior you’ve described appears to be regarding polyphony controls for the multitrack modules themselves. We agree that this would be quite useful – there are plans to support this in an upcoming release.
hmm - well, the most obvious uses i can see would be something like a music playlist. ideally you don’t want one piece of music to trigger until after the previous cue has finished playing (or nearly finished). this can now be approximated in FMOD Studio with single regions and sustain points but the multiple trigger as it currently stands can potentially trigger a bunch of sounds as fast as the event can trigger then. that’s fine if you want it but sometimes you want the voice to be exclusive or to only to allow limited instances. as it is now it’s tricky to do music changeovers, because there doesn’t seem an obvious stop code except the keyoff for a loop.
again, i may be misunderstanding things, but i do appreciate you’re considering adding it in the future.