It takes over 10 minutes to build .bank files for my project. It’s a huge project so that is understandable, but if I make a small change and then rebuild banks it takes another 10 minutes. No sound data was changed. Is it re-compressing everything? The progress bar gets to 5% quickly and just stays there. Is there a log that shows that it is actually doing? Should it be caching already converted files?
It’s hard to say why this is happening without having access to your project. Still, there are some things you can try.
Have you tried splitting your project up into multiple banks? Using multiple banks in a project is useful for limiting the amount of bank data that must be loaded up-front in your game project - and more importantly for this thread, it allows you to only build the banks that you’ve changed instead of rebuilding all the banks in your project.
Are you using the “Build” command, or the “Build All Platforms” command? The latter builds your project for all targeted platforms, while the former builds it only for the currently selected platform. (Of course, if your game project only targets one platform, these two commands are exactly the same.)
Have you tried splitting your project’s metadata and sample data into multiple banks? This can significantly reduce the time required for building in some cases, depending on the project’s content. You can change your project’s bank file separation in the “Build” tab of the preferences dialog.
Calling it “re-compressing” is misleading. While compressing the audio assets used by your project is part of the bank-building process, there’s more to it than that; building also involves encoding both sample data and metadata into a highly-optimized format designed to optimize its loading and use by the FMOD Engine.
In any case, FMOD Studio does indeed cache already-built files to reduce future build times, but there are limits to how much time can be saved in this way.
I only have one platform (so far). When I said “compressing” I meant “encoding”. It is odd that it takes the same amount of time even if no sound wave data has changed. I would expect that to be very fast.
I will try breaking out the music from sfx and see if that speeds up the build.
Thanks
It is crazy how long this takes. Coming up on 10 minutes to build banks. Why doesn’t it cache the encoded data? The wav files haven’t changed. I see a cache folder? Is something not set right?
The other thing I would love is a better progress bar. It goes to 5% then hangs there for the entire 10 minutes.
hey, if you have not separated your metadata from your audio banks this is expected behaviour.
have you tried splitting the banks this way, as mentioned here - https://fmod.com/docs/2.00/studio/getting-events-into-your-game.html