Two things

I love FMOD, thanks so much for providing such a comprehensive middleware. I look forward to each upgrade and improvement.

I guess these are more suggestions than questions, but I can phrase them as Qs.

Why does a new Event, or for that matter also a copied and pasted event, default to being Unassigned with regard to Banks? A copied or duplicated event should be assigned to the same event as it’s source, and I don’t see any reason why all events can’t default to the Master Bank. Why would you ever want an unassigned event?

A very small improvement would save me a lot of mouse clicks: if you drag an audio file into the event window, could it automatically create a new track? This would be a massive improvement, and is something we are used to from most DAWs.

Thanks for your time!

It’s true that you want every event to be assigned to at least one bank. However, it’s equally true that assigning all events to the same bank is a bad idea, and there’s no way for FMOD Studio to guess how you want to distribute events among your banks.

Banks are a way of controlling how your game project loads content, and assigning all events to the same bank means you’d load all of your events into memory at the same time. Loading all your events at once consumes a lot of memory in all but the smallest of projects, so assigning all events to a single bank is usually bad practice - and automatically assigning all events to a specific bank actively encourages that bad practice. (We’ve actually seen this first-hand: Back in the days of FMOD Designer, assets were automatically assigned to banks - and we received complaints that this led to giant banks, and that picking individual assets out and reassigning them to smaller banks was a pain.)

So, we decided it was better to not assign events to banks by default, but to clearly indicate which events aren’t yet assigned to banks and to provide a search filter so that assigning events to banks can be as painless as possible.

That said, a copy of an existing event should be assigned to the same banks as the original. I’ve added that to our bug tracker, and it’ll be fixed in an upcoming release.

Incidentally, the master bank contains information about the project mixer, and so must be loaded into memory at all times. It’s therefore best to assign events to the master bank only if you need the ability to call upon them at a moment’s notice at all times.

Automatically creating a new track if you drag an asset below any existing tracks in the editor is already on our feature/improvement tracker, and will be considered and potentially scheduled at our next quarterly roadmap meeting.

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Excellent response, thanks!

Maybe addind an “Automatically assign to Master Bank” option, and letting the user decide.

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Maybe addind an “Automatically assign to Master Bank” option, and letting the user decide.

As I said, assigning events to the master bank is a bad idea, as it make it impossible to unload those events from memory. If we do add an option to automatically assign newly created events to a bank, we will allow you to specify a non-master bank to assign events to.

Is this really true? Based on what I’ve seen, only the meta data is loaded, the wave files are loaded and unloaded automatically as the game progresses.

My game is a big open world so there is no way to know what bank to load and unload. Literally any sound can be played at any time. Most games I’ve ever worked on are like this.

I’m using one big master bank and can’t see any way around that.

Is this really true?

No, it’s not true. I made an error when typing my response: I meant to write “events” rather than “assets.” Loading a bank into memory means loading the event metadata, but not necessarily the event sample data.

Sorry for the confusion. I’ll correct my original post.