UX Improvement Suggestions – First Round

FMOD Studio
1

  • I’ve been using and loving FMOD for a long time, but there are several UX issues that really shouldn’t exist at this point. These aren’t “nice-to-have” ideas — they are basic usability problems that actively slow down everyday workflows.

    Here are the main ones:

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  • Focus should move to the selected event after clearing search

    After searching for an event, selecting it, and then clicking the X to clear the search, the focus should naturally move to that event.

    Currently, the event is only highlighted and not focused, so I have to scroll the mouse wheel multiple times to locate the event I selected.

  • Folders should remain expanded during event search

    When searching for events, folders should always remain expanded.

    Currently, folders collapse and must be manually opened each time, which makes event search inefficient.

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  • Trigger conditions must be copy/pasteable between events

    Trigger conditions should be copyable and pasteable across events.

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  • Automatic “Sort by Name” option
    Sorting by name currently has to be done manually each time. An option for Automatic Sort by Name should be available.

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  • Prevent accidental closing of the mini event selection window
    I’m always nervous about misclicking in the mini event selection window.
    If I click on an empty area of the window (not on an event), the window closes immediately.
    Please prevent the window from closing in this case.

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  • Open events directly from the Mixer routing list
    In the Mixer’s Routing list, double-clicking an event should open that event directly in the Event window.

What do you think?
For now, I’ve intentionally limited this list to features that feel essential in a modern UX.
I sincerely hope these improvements can be considered and implemented.

2

Thanks for the suggestions! I’ll go through each of them in turn.

I take it you mean that the browser should scroll to keep the active item visible when the browser search terms change. I can see how that would be useful, and have added this suggestion to our feature and improvement tracker.

If I’ve misunderstood what you meant, please let me know.

I’m not sure what you mean by this, as we already have that feature: Currently, the expanded/collapsed state of a folder does not change when you change the content of the search bar - and so, if a folder is expanded, it already remains expanded when you enter a new search into the search bar or clear an existing search.

Do you mean that folders should automatically expand if any of their contents matches the search term? We did try that during an early stage of FMOD Studio’s development, but because search terms are commonly keyed into the search bar one letter at a time, and any single-letter search term is likely to match a vast number of items in the project, it had the side effect of expanding nearly every folder in the project whenever a search was performed. As that seemed undesireable, we instead implemented the “Flatten” button, which removes all folders from view and displays their contents in a flat list. Combined with search, the flatten button allows you to find items without needing to expand their containing folders.

That definitely seems useful. I’ve added it to our feature and improvement tracker.

The order of items in browsers (other than the snapshots browser) are not serialised; whenever you load a project, all (non-snapshot) browser items in that project are automatically sorted by name. As such, any change you make to the order of items within a browser only persists until you close the project.

Is that existing behavior insufficient to your needs? If so, could you please describe in more detail how you’d like the behavior to be changed?

The event selection menu is intended to function like any other menu: It remains open until you click on an item to select it, or click outside the menu to close it.

Could you please clarify where you’re clicking that causes it to close? The behavior you describe could potentially be a bug.

You can already open events in the event editor from the routing browser. To do so, right-click on the event in the routing browser and select “Open event in > Event Editor” from the context menu.

That being said, I can see how being able to just double-click on them would make things faster. I’ve added this suggestion to our feature and improvement tracker.