Programmer Sound vs. Event Sound for FX Dialogues

FMOD Studio
1

Hi,

On a project that had dialogue lines and dialogue FX like when enemies got hit, killed or just said random dialogue lines I didn’t know whether to use the programmer sounds to control those or separate events. At the end we used the events separate for the enemies stuff and the programmer sound for the important dialogue lines.

I’m currently working on another project and since we have time I would like to know what’s the best thing to do? To use the programmer sound (PS) for dialogues and dialogue FX, use two PS for each situation or to use 1 event with a parameter to control which line I need to be played or use separate events, specially for the Dialogue FX. This question is towards performance and effectiveness (or less problematic) for both FMOD Studio and UE4 since the project is being made in this engine.

I hope I made my point clear, if not, let me know, if I did, I’ll really appreciate the suggestions to know what’s best for the sake of, like I said before, performance and effectiveness.

Andrés

2

Hi Andrés,

There isn’t a “best practice” in this situation, it comes down to what is the easiest for you and your team.

Programmer sounds would need keys to be passed in, so in code you would need an array of all the necessary dialogue FX keys which you can pull a random value from.

By comparison, you can use one or multiple events with randomized multi instruments to do the same thing. This is the simplest approach and most flexible as you can quickly add more sounds without needing to adjust code or keys.txt files.

In terms of performance, there is nearly no difference. For the case of these dialogue FX, I would suggest using multi instruments as they require the least work to update.

Thanks,
Richard

1 Like
3

Thank you Richard for the reply. In that case it doesn’t matter if I use both I guess