After adding a Multi Sound to an event with several sounds in the playlist you can ‘Set play percentage’ to a sound. This sets the probability to 99% and it cannot be changed afterwards. Also after setting the probability for one sound you cannot set the probability of other sounds. Am I doing something wrong?
By default, all the entries in a multi sound module’s playlist have an equal probability of being selected to play. Play percentage allows you to change this by setting specific entries to have a higher or lower chance of appearing: If an entry is given, say, a 10% play percentage, it will play 10% of the time even if there’s only four entries.
Entries which aren’t assigned a specific play percentage divvy up whatever percentage hasn’t been a to specific events; So, if you had a playlist with four entries and one of them had a play percentage of 10%, the other three would each have an implicit play percentage of 30%.
Studio prevents you from adding a play percentage to an event if that percentage would increase the total of the play percentages assigned to all entries in that playlist above 99%. This is to avoid there being playlist entries that consume system resources but never play; If the total play percentage of only some of the entries in a playlist totalled 100%, the remaining entries would necessarily have play percentages of 0%.
To edit the play percentage of a playlist entry, double-click on the percentage value. We should probably also have a context-sensitive menu item for this, so I’ve added a request for one to our tracker.
I found out that you can edit it by double clicking. However you need to place the cursor after the % and remove everything before typing in a new number. Trying to type something after double clicking does not work.
Thanks for the report - it looks like there’s a bug that wasn’t picked up by our tests. I’ll add this issue to our tracker.
Is there anyway to select more than one at a time?
I don’t want to sit here and set percentages for groups of hundreds of sounds, can’t I just highlight all and set?
I remember I sued to be able to do this in Designer with no problem… why does studio have all these weird limitations?
@JeremyBochenek There’s no way to bulk assign play percentages in currently-released versions of FMOD Studio, but you don’t have to set play percentages for every sound in a playlist; You only need set it for the few that have a higher or lower play percentage than the others. (This is explained in the answer above.)
In both Designer and Studio, the limitations of any feature are a byproduct of the design decisions made during that feature’s development, informed by the technical constraints and intended uses of that feature. In this particular case, the inability to bulk-specify play percentages is intended to encourage users to take advantage of the implicitly set play percentages, rather than setting all play percentages explicitly.
We are aware that the UI does not currently make the current implicit play percentages of playlist entries’ obvious, and have scheduled some relevant improvements to the interface for version 1.09.00.
The chance property in the conditions section and the play percentages of items in a multi insturment’s playlist do two different things.
The chance property in an instrument’s conditions represent the chance that the instrument is triggered whenever all its other trigger conditions start being met. For example, if the instrument’s trigger condition is 44%, as in your screenshot, the instrument has a 44% chance of being triggered and playing.
The play percentage properties of playlist entries appear only when the playlist set set to “shuffle” or “randomize” playlist selection mode. In those modes, the playlist selects which of its entries to play randomly. If there are no play percentages set, the entries all have an equal chance of being selected; but if one of the entries has a play percentage set, that entry’s probability of being selected is instead equal to that percentage. Thus, setting play percentages allows you to weight how your playlist selects entries, making some entries more or less likely to be selected for playback than others.
Which is to say, play percentages are not trigger conditions for the instrument; they do not determine whether the instrument triggers and plays any content; they only determine which content the instrument is more and less likely to play when it is triggered.
In the case that all play percentages of a playlist’s entries do not add up to 100% (as in your screenshot), FMOD still treats them as weights by assigning each playlist entry a chance of being selected equal to its play percentage value out of the sum of all play percentage values in the playlist. So, in the case where a playlist contains five playlist entries all set to a play percentage of 5%, they will each have a 5/25 ( or 20%) chance of being selected when the instrument is triggered.
thanks for explaining in depth