Variations and parameters for Audio Tables

FMOD Studio
1

Hi! I think I know the answer to these, but I thought I would ask here as it would be great if this was supported.

I’m looking to use localized Audio Tables to handle dialog (including “reaction” lines such as “Yes, sir!”) in our Unreal game. There are 2 features that feel natural so might (should?) be supported:

  1. Multiple variations for reactions lines (e.g. “Yes sir”, “Affirmative”, etc.)
  2. Two “intensity” settings for each line (e.g. calm vs panicked)

So my questions are:

Q1: Now with regular (non-audio table) events, it feels like I should be able to solve #1 using multi-instruments and #2 using parameters. Is that correct? (I’ve used these in the past so it feels like that’s the case)

Q2: Feels like neither of these can be implemented directly with Audio Tables, because we are just dealing with programmer instruments, which the application “fills in” manually. Does that mean I need to create a manager that tracks how many variations of each sound are available for the current intensity (potentially by polling the bank? please let me know if that’s doable), then pick one out of the available ones?

I hope I didn’t miss anything obvious :slight_smile: Thanks!

Francois

2

So I assume it the answer is that the game needs to handle variations/intensities itself.

To do that, it would require a list of available sounds from the Audio Table, to know how many variations it can randomize against.

That leads to the question: What is the best way to know if a certain sound exists in an audio table?

i.e. that way, the game can test if “yes_sir2”, “yes_sir3” exist, etc. so it can randomize properly.

This is the same question as in this question (which had no answer at the time).

As the very worst case, you could try to play/load the sounds and see if you get an error back, but that sounds potentially very inefficient.

Thank you!

3

I cannot think of a way to combine multi instruments and audio tables to solve the problem in this instance so yes I think you would need to handle variations and intensities yourself.
You can check whether a sound exists in an audio table by calling Studio::System::getSoundInfo, alternatively you could create a keys.txt file and parse it yourself to get a list of existing keys.

4

Thank you; it’s unfortunate but what I figured was probably the case. Shouldn’t be too hard to come up with, and getSoundInfo() doesn’t sound too inefficient call repeatedly for this purpose. Thanks again!

1 Like