New Audio Engine: Quick-Start Guide

[dan.reynolds]

dan.reynolds I'd like to congratulate you for the amazing job in so short period of time. Audio in Unreal now feels like an entire different level of user experience since you guys started building this new audio engine!

Hi BrUnO XaVIeR! I'm so glad you're having a positive experience! We hope to continue to improve and innovate on that experience now that the foundational groundwork has been laid! It's been an amazing ride so far and our team has grown all thanks to the community enthusiastically embracing our efforts and a huge thanks goes to Aaron McLeran, Audio Engine lead whose vision for the AudioMixer has made all of this a possibility!

I'll be sure to pass on your comments to the rest of the team!

[Georgy Treshchev]

@dan.reynolds
This topic is pretty interesting. I have a problem related to sound envelope that I still cannot solve yet.

I have an Audio Component, it has a dispatcher called "OnAudioSingleEnvelopeData". It does exactly what I need, but it calculates this data only while the sound is playing, and cannot do it in advance. I need to have the Envelope data as an array for whole sound at once, in advance. Do you know how this can be done?

[David Boura]

We would like to have quite a few tutorials, videos, blog posts, documentation, etc. But we will be holding off on a lot of educational productions at least until the new Audio Engine is no longer experimental.

Is the audio engine still experimental? What about tutorials, videos, blog posts, documentation, etc. ?
First page print screens and gifs are not a guide and do not help, unless you're already very good at bp's.
Having to read 14 pages here, all other threads, random videos where you "show" either.

And being disrespectful with people makes this Engine very repulsive, Dan.

[David Boura]

Obviously, you don't want people to actually achieve what you show in your videos. Shame on you.

"Your success is our priority"

[Minus_Kelvin]

Hi David,

I'm sorry you're struggling with learning the native UE4 audio engine technology.

As you know, we've been working hard on bringing it up to parity with features that one would expect in a modern game audio engine. We had a huge amount of tech debt and legacy to contend with and, now, a very demanding and popular game to support.

You might be surprised to find out that our team is quite small. Although growing, I was the first audio programmer Epic hired about 6 years ago. I worked alone for a few years. Dan started as QA with me and, after our announcement in 2017, was promoted to our embedded technical sound designer. At that point, it was literally just Dan and I. Since then, we've been able to get resources to grow the team. We now have about 6 audio programmers and a dedicated support engineer. We've only been reasonably staffed at this point for about a year and a half.

I say this because Dan is not on the community team nor is he on the documentation team. He works with us as on the engine team as a developer. He is our go-to design consultant on new feature development and works on all of our "special projects" as a content creator. Every demo you have seen come out from Epic at GDC, he was the core audio developer. In fact, he often works as a technical design consultant for Fortnite as they utilize some of the newer features for things like Party Royale and is often a boot on the ground at many of our live events on location (e.g. he has flown to LA multiple times for technical audio support for the huge live Fortnite events). His work in the community is purely voluntary and *extra* to his work at Epic. In fact, as his lead, I often encourage him to reduce his community engagement. He does it out of passion for the discipline and care for the community. Sometimes his voluntary tutorials and videos are the only source of documentation for a while before the official docs team, which services all of epic, can catch up.

The good news is we're working on building out our audio engine team on all fronts. We're working with the community team and the docs team to get more official Epic tutorials and documentation published and community team and evangelists more knowledgeable about audio (e.g. Zak Parrish, etc) . Our official documentation is much better than it was only a few years ago. We're able to get documentation on new features close to release. This was not the case even a year ago.

We're also working with 3rd party contractors to make "official" learning resources and tutorials for UE4 audio, which this thread is pointing people to. David Raybould and Richard Stevens, authors of the extremely helpful, if now outdated, book, Game Audio Implementation, are in fact the authors of our ever-growing online learning resources. These are the definitive and offical tutorials I would refer you to for more step-by-step how-to's for the beginner. They are well-received and people have been expressing the opinion to us that it has helped them to understand our engine better. They are building the courseware up and work directly with us (internally, they are on slack with us and have direct and daily communication with us).

As for your specific screenshot of a conversation with Dan in discord, I understand it can be frustrating to watch a tutorial where somebody has not explained all steps and where they assume a level of proficiency that you are not at. It happens all the time in programming tutorials and I often feel that frustration when I am trying to learn something at a deep level but am struggling with fundamentals that the presenter assumes I have already mastered. In these cases, what I do is try to articulate exactly what aspects I'm confused about and try to find resources on that. In this case, fundamentals of Blueprint scripting are usually not the focus of Dan's demonstration videos. There are a huge variety of excellent resources on Blueprint scripting specifically. Any knowledge derived from such tutorials would be immediately useful and apply to anything Dan is presenting.

UE4 is a complex tool and nobody, and I mean nobody, understands all of it. Documentation is varied in quality and coverage and things are constantly and rapidly changing. The target is moving. We're (the royal we) all in this together and we're all trying to make game development better.

I hope you can understand the process is ongoing and forgive us our imperfections as we strive to improve on our tech, our resources for learning, and the quality of our products.

[David Boura]

Thank you for this feedback, and the time it took to write it.
i had to take an enormous decision to be able to move forward and change to x game engine wich is more beginner friendly about coding.
Please be sure i'm not ironising here, but it seems i was right, as there's nothing new under the sun for me, no answer from Dan, no Synth upload... just the same patient endless waiting.

My project, for wich i really needed only 2 more things to start being autonomous, build my 1st prototype and present it to a jury to maybe obtain funds and hire someone here, is now a rar file, and i have to learn everything from scratch again.

I know all you said is true because i'm here since the beginning, i'm just pointing what i said, and UE4 is great.
Cheers.