Wondering- is it possible to be able to set play percentages in a multi instrument while still getting round robin style playback? I’d love to be able to set one or two sounds as very low percentage ‘easter egg’ results but keep my instrument from cueing any sound twice in a row.
is this possible?
There is a way to get the behavior you describe.
As you know, if you give any entry in a multi instrument’s playlist a play percentage, that instrument will become capable of selecting the same playlist entry to play twice in a row even if the playlist is set to shuffle.
You can trivially avoid this limitation by using nested multi instruments, since only play percentages in the multi instrument’s own playlist directly affect its behavior.
For example, suppose you have a multi instrument whose playlist contains eleven audio assets. You want ten of these audio assets to play with equal probability, but for the eleventh to only play a tiny fraction of the time, and for the instrument to never play the same asset twice in a row. Simply remove the almost-never-play audio file and one of the other audio files from the multi instrument’s playlist, add a new multi instrument to the multi instrument’s playlist, put the two removed audio files in the nested multi instrument’s playlist, and set the almost-never-play audio file’s play percentage to 1%. The parent multi instrument will select all of its playlist entries with equal probability, and will never select the same playlist entry twice; when it selects the nested multi instrument, that multi instrument will select one of its playlist entries to play, obeying their play percentages. The result is that the almost-never-play audio file will be selected only 0.1% of the time, the other audio file in the nested multi instrument’s playlist will be selected 9.9% of the time, the other audio files will each be selected 10% of the time, and no audio file will ever play twice in a row. (As a side effect, this means that the almost-never-play audio file will never play immediately after or before the other audio file in the nested multi instrument’s playlist, since that would require the parent multi instrument to select the multi instrument playlist twice in a row. This is unlikely to be a significant problem for most events.)
This works perfectly! Using a 10% play chance on the nested event and then a 10% on the almost-never-play should give me a %1 play chance (if my math works out).
Thank you!
That’s exactly right.
Of course, you shouldn’t actually set any play percentages in the parent multi instrument, so the only way to ensure a 10% play chance for every entry in its play list is for it to have exactly ten playlist entries.