Has anyone done something similar to Wwise’s Rooms and Portals with FMOD and Unity (or other engine)?
So basically if the listener is outside a room with an open door and sounds are playing from within the room (e.g. dialogue), I want that to play from the position of the open door(s).
I’ve seen people make some hacky solutions using the transcivers to send sounds to an empty event placed at the doors, but for a bigger project this seems really hard to maintain, so I am curious if people have come up with other solutions for this
Off the top of my head, I know that people have made games in which specific event emitters move to different position depending on the position of the listener. This is usually done as a way of handling environmental sounds that are supposed to come from an area rather than from one specific point (for example, to ensure that the sound of waves breaking always comes from the section of coastline that’s nearest to the player), but could be used to achieve the effect you describe, as well.
It’s not exactly the same thing, but people have also used either ray casting or FMOD’s built-in geometry-based occlusion system to detect when event emitters are occluded from the listener and muffle the corresponding event instances accordingly.
I would absolutely love some kind of portal system like this - I’ve currently been making my own awkward workaround, involving lots of transceivers, automating sound size, and tracking distances between points in engine, but it would be extremely difficult to scale up and is very error prone. It also seems to me to be one of the main benefits of using Wwise which is a shame, because otherwise I really enjoy using FMOD!
Essentially, what I do now is this:
I have one main area, with two small buildings in it
All ambience is played and sent via transceivers to the doorways of these buildings, and a final gain plugin at the end of the chain mutes this event (so it can only be heard via transceiver)
colliders are used on the buildings to tell if I am inside or outside, and to respectively update a parameter which tracks player distance from the doorway while outside or while inside.
Lots of automation curves change EQ and spatialiser settings to make it sound like the sound is around you while outside, but collapsed to the doorway position while inside.
It’s a bit more complicated than that and could do with refining, but the core of it is still very awkward to use. Some kind of simpler system of achieving the same effect would huge relief and time saver, and if it were easier, hopefully we could see more games be shipped with this kind of feature!
+1 for this. Essentially Wwise just uses its ability to spatialize buses to create the effect. Being able to set the 3D position of buses and create “instances” of these buses or something similar is super powerful!
This might already be possible, but one potential solution could be to dynamically add transciever/receiver pairings to emitters at runtime, to allow for multi-source point portaling without introducing the overhead of additional voices, and the potential phasing issues that could introduce.
This wouldn’t solve the whole rooms & portals problem, but definitely opens the door to much easier home-spun systems.
I’ve added the three of you to the list of people interested in this feature.
You’re right that you could use transceiver effects to simulate much of the behavior of Rooms and Portals, but here are limits to this approach that prevent it from being a perfect workaround.
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The Audio Propagation feature of the Oculus Audio SDK provides real-time reverb and occlusion simulation based on game geometry. Its goal is to provide accurate audio propagation through a scene with minimal set up. You simply tag the scene meshes that you want included in the simulation and select the acoustic material for each mesh.
+1 As I propose in project we disscussed Duplicate/mirror event (in Unity)? - #5 by doudar41. It will be great to have build-in system based on mesh collisions for occulision and reflections. I’m making one, but I’m affraid that it wouldn’t be the best optimized solution and for now it looks too complecated.
This would be a much welcomed feature