let’s say i want 10 sound instances of the same sound event, for example a weapon sound. It is possible of course for these 10 instances to be used by weapons that are in very close proximity of each other, for example multiple turrets on a warship. if i then fire these turrets all at the same time the sound will of course be synced up and each instance past the first adds roughly 2 dB to the overall volume. That would mean since the volume will be high, since weapons are loud anyway it is pretty much guaranteed that the additional ca. 8 dB will push the volume past dBFS. How can i keep the volume down so that no more than 2 db get added to the overall volume at best or no additional volume at all? I tried using a limiter but the playback only got distorted by doing so.
If you want to avoid volume bloat due to multiple instances of the event playing at the same time, a simple solution is to not play so many instances of it. There’s a couple of different ways in which you can do that.
If you select the event in the event editor and look in the deck, you’ll see a property called “Cooldown.” Whenever an instance of the event starts, FMOD Studio will not start any new instances of the event for this period of time. This could be used to prevent multiple instances of your event from triggering at the same time.
Alternatively, you could use the “Max Instances” property of the event in a similar way. It puts a upper limit on how many instances of the event can be playing simultaneously; if you try to start a new instance of the event while a number of instances equal to the max instances are already playing, FMOD limits the number of instances according to the stealing behavior.
Thx, but I am afraid this wasn’t what i was looking for. I know max instances. I need the 10 instances to populate the level. What I don’t need is many or all of those instances being used in the same location aka one warship. Basically what i am looking for is to get some sort of local instance limiting compared to global instance limiting or a comparable solution.
As of the time of writing (November of 2020), there is no easy way to do this in FMOD. Accordingly, I have added some relevant improvements to our feature/improvement tracker; they will be evaluated and potentially scheduled for development at a future date.
In the mean time, you will have to track and limit when new instances of an event are created in your game’s code.