Hi guys. I’m trying to come to terms with stealing and I’m wondering if you can help.
I have several of the same sound quite close to each other in a level and want to set the max instances to, say, 2. I want the audible ones to be the ones that the player is closest to. I figured, therefore, that stealing from quietest, furthest or oldest would all be viable options, but none of them are working at all. The new sounds aren’t triggering at all as the player gets close, just keeping the two sources that are already playing, by this time very quiet.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Have you set up the stealing in the Mixer group, or for the event itself?
Within the event settings, Furthest should work by distance alone, but Quietest and Virtualize require that the Master gain of the event does the volume-by-distance, either via a Spatializer that has an attenuation active, or via master volume automation. Only the master volume affects the virtualization, track volumes or sound module volumes do not.
Woops forgot to try putting it on the mixer group. I thought you’d saved me then but I’m still getting issues. Now it mostly works except for the same two instances every time not stealing.
It works better at event level if it’s instances of the same event you want to limit. So just use the event-set stealing. But how is your event set up? If the 3D Panner (Spatializer) has 2D mix added to it (Mix override > 0%), it can also cause the virtualization and stealing to malfunction.
The override mix is set to 0% but changing it doesn’t help.
I didn’t have a spatalizer on the master before, just on the tracks, but, again, adding this in didn’t help.
Are the sounds looping? Which engine / API / setup is this done in?
It may be that the level starts all the sound instances, but since only 2 are allowed, the rest get stolen. Try the Virtualize mode, it keeps all the sounds playing but only 2 closest ones are audible, the rest are in low-cost ‘idle’ mode.
Virtualised sorted it. Thanks very much for your help.
For future users - yes the sounds are looping and the level starts just within earshot of all of them so I suspected this might be the problem, I just didn’t know what to do with.
Also for future users - this was was with UE4. Sorry to not include that information earlier.