Why use a dedicated master bank

FMOD Studio
1

Is there an upside having a seperate master bank? Eg

  • MasterBank (master)
  • FirstBank
    • Event1
    • Event2
    • …

vs having none?

  • FirstBank (master)
    • Event1
    • Event2
    • …
2

Usually yes, but it depends.

If you’ve put all your project’s audio content into one bank, there’s no benefit to having a separate master bank. This is because you’ll need to have your one content bank loaded at all times in order to play audio - and if you’re going to have it loaded at all times, there’s no point in having a separate master bank.

However, putting all your content into one bank is very unusual. It’s much more common for a game’s content to be sorted into multiple different banks, each of which corresponds to a different level, creature, biome, or some other category that makes sense for the game. Separating content out into multiple banks means that you can load specific banks of content when you’re likely need it and unload them when you don’t, in order to reduce the amount of content that needs to be kept loaded into memory at any given time. In such cases, it makes sense to have a separate master bank, since the master bank needs to be loaded at all times, and therefore can’t be unloaded to save memory the way other banks can be.

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