Hi there. first post.
I been working on music for an indie-game as a part of my studies. Im curious about if you can run several fmod-projects in unreal? Beacuse it would make things a whole lot easier for us since we are one group that makes the music and another one that makes the sound effects.
Welcome to our forums, Jaetten!
Technically yes, but it would take a lot of work and have undesirable side effects. If your goal is to have multiple people working on the same project, there are better and easier ways to achieve that.
The main issue with using multiple different FMOD Studio projects is that each project would have its own mixer, and would route only its own content into that mixer. The redundant extra mixers would increase the resource consumption of your game; and, as each mixer would only handle its own project’s content and not that of the other people who made events, they would not be able to mix content made by different users together, thus defeating the purpose of mixers.
As I said, though, there are better and easier alternatives.
The first and (in my opinion) best is to use one of our source control integrations. FMOD Studio was designed from the ground up to support exactly the kind of multi-user collaboration you describe for people with source control: Everything from the format of a project on disk to our UI is built to allow multiple different people to work on different events within a single FMOD Studio project, without any risk of interfering with or overwriting each other’s work. To learn more about using source control with an FMOD Studio project, I recommend reading the Using Source Control chapter of the FMOD Studio User Manual.
If your team is, for any reason, unable or unwilling to use a source control integration, the next best option is to use the same techniques that allow downloadable and user-generated content to be added to an existing game to allow different developers to add their independently-developed pieces of content to your game. You can read more about these techniques in the Supporting Downloadable Content and User-Generated Content chapter of the FMOD Studio User Manual. If you use the methods described in that chapter, you should be able to furnish your team with separate copies of a project that let them create separate content that all routes into the same mixer.
If the methods for creating DLC and UGC content seem like overkill for your project, there’s a far simpler method: Copy and paste. FMOD Studio supports copying events from one project and pasting them into another. It involves a manual step, but it’s a simple step to perform, and avoids the problems caused by using multiple separate projects.
Do any of the above methods work for your game?