I’m experiencing a bad hitch in our game. At the point of the hitch, I get a lot of these:
[2016.01.06-20.18.23:029][753]LogFMOD:Warning: …\src\fmod_playback_instrument.cpp(1084) - Loading delay exceeded, sound may play at incorrect time
When I stop sounds from playing, I no longer get the hitch.
I have been trying to preload the data for certain events in blueprint to keep this from happening, but not having any luck. The warning would help a lot of it had additional information.
That log message does usually indicate that one or more samples have not been preloaded, so FMOD is being forced to load them on demand, just when the game tries to play an event. This will introduce a delay to starting each sound, while the system waits until the sample data is loaded and ready to play.
The solution is to preload the samples via Blueprint, as you implied. Alternatively, you can try the ‘load all sample data’ tick box in the UE4 project settings -> FMOD menu.
However, even falling back to on-demand loading, I would not expect these small delays to cause a bad “hitch”. Could you provide a little more detail about the nature of the hitch? When does it happen? Does the whole game freeze? Just the sound? Just a particular event?
If this problem persists, then you should contact support@fmod.org so that we can investigate in more detail.
The whole game froze, for quite a while (I would guess for maybe a second?) So, I hacked up FMODAudioComponent to log what events were being played, and I used blueprint to preload the ones I thought could be the issue. This ended up getting rid of the hitch.
Well, that is strange because at worst it should just mean that some sounds have a slight playback delay, while they wait to be loaded (which is an asynchronous operation). I can’t see how that would freeze the whole game.
So, I’m glad you managed to get rid of the hitch. But I’d like to go back and investigate the underlying cause of this game freeze. Would you mind if we contact you later, to ask some more questions?
Yeah, sure. I’d be more than happy to help. I don’t have a lot more information. Whenever I would break execution while the hitch was occurring, one of the threads was always in the fmod read function, which tipped me off originally to what might be going on.