Sounds in front and behind you

FMOD Studio
1

Good day,

Im trying to make a first person player in unity so that if you move forward, the footstep sound sounds forward, and if you walk back it sounds behind the player.

I put the sound in 5.1 and made Surround direction and Surround extent parameters for my event and I can capture left and right perfectly (I could do this with a panner as well), but a sound in front of you or behind sounds exactly the same. Same with the 3D preview. Is there a way I could make this sounds different so the player knows if the sound is behind/in front of him? I have seen some games that do this, but I cannot find a reliable way to do it.

2

Are you listening on headphones? From a 5.1 downmix to headphones has no discernible difference for front and behind. You’d need HRTF object panning to do that. And then it only works on stereo headphoness.

But for the player in 1st person, the footsteps should always just come from below you, it would not be sensible to make them front and behind based on movement direction. Because the center of weight is below the person, and that’s where the foot steps.

Directional panning is better reserved for other characters and point sounds than the player.

3

Yes, I know that footsteps sounds should come from below, but from a Gameplay perspective I wanted to try front and below sounds. HTRF is not supported by FMOD yet, right? I have tried with Resonance Audio for FMOD and Unity but the results weren’t enough different either.

4

The 3D preview in FMOD Studio is used to test distances and directions from an instance of an Event to the listener. If you have the Event always below you, it doesn’t have any sense to test the 3D preview because the position and the direction will be the same than the listener (if you attached the Event of steps to the Listener).

Maybe you could try to attach the event to a GameObject in Unity inside of the Player, and place it slightly infront of you when you advance and behind when you go back. Also you could reinforce the differences doing Automations with parameters like Direction. Those are just ideas.