Marcin Przybylowicz FMOD visual music system?

In their GDC talk Martin and Mikolai discuss the Wild Hunt music and briefly show a slide with a visual music sequencing system supposedly in FMOD. I guess that this is a custom script but something like this would be amazing for designing music systems, Or does it already exist and I’ve been sleeping under a rock…?

If the link takes you to the start the section is at 36.27 min GDC Slavic Adaptation of Music in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

That’s not a custom script. The image in that slide is a screenshot from FMOD Designer, the precursor to FMOD Studio. Specifically, it shows music constructed using FMOD Designer’s music system, which was distinct from its event system.

Naturally, we didn’t throw that functionality away when we began developing FMOD Studio. Instead, we preserved it, and made it compatible with sound effects as well as music, by building it into Studio’s system of logic markers. The UI was completely redesigned, but the functionality is still there.

Thanks Joseph for the detailed answer. Yes and I love that you can work with sfx and music seamlessly in FMOD. The mindmap-like look of the UI is appealing to me though. Sometimes the linear approach can be difficult to overview especially when there are multiple options for the transitions.

Re-implementing Designer’s music system exactly as it was would be a retrograde step, due to its limited functionality and incompatibility with event-specific tools. That being said, I can see how being able to visualize an event’s transition logic in a manner similar to Designer’s music system might be useful, so I’ve added a suggestion that we implement such a view to our feature/improvement tracker.

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Thanks Joseph! As per always the FMOD forum support is shining bright!