Multi or Scatter instrument for random ambience sounds?

FMOD Studio
1

Hello!

I’m trying to set up an instrument that will play random sounds at random times with quite a big gap between them, like several minutes. I dont want the sound randomized in space and maybe not even in volume. Just randomized in time. How do I do this best, with multi instrument or scattter? And also, should I put it in the same event as, say, background noise ambience?

Would it be enough to set chance in trigger behaviour pretty low, like 20%?

2

There’s a few different ways to do this, but it sounds like a scatterer instrument would be the best fit for your requirements.

You can disable a scatterer instrument from randomizing the location of sounds in space by setting its “Min & Max Scatter Distance” to both be 0. This also prevents the scatterer instrument from automatically spatializing the sounds it spawns, so you won’t need to worry about it affecting the spawned sounds’ volumes, either.

As for time, the scatterer instrument supports intervals of up to an hour* between the start of one spawned sound and the start of the next; all you have to do is double-click on one of the values of the Min & Max Spawn Interval property and type in the amoutn of time you want. For example, if you wanted it to spawn a new sound every five to fifteen minutes, you’d set the min spawn interval to “300 sec” and the max spawn interval to “900 sec”. (Note that you can’t set min spawn interval to be more than max interval, so you’ll want to set the max spawn interval first.)

There’s no one best practice. If you want these sounds to play as part of your background ambience - that is, to have a chance of spawning whenever your background ambience is playing - then it makes sense to put them in the same event. On the other hand, if you want to be able to control when these random sounds play independently of when your background ambience plays, it would make more sense to put them in separate events.

*Technically it is possible to increase the interval between sounds above an hour by using the spawn rate property, but very few games require such long intervals between sounds.