Submit your questions directly to expert members on our team – ask about feature insights, overarching development guidance, career advice, industry questions, and of course, what you’re wondering specifically about Audio in UEFN!
Sound good? Let’s roll!
Make sure to check out the awesome backgrounds and expertise of our special Epic developer guests featured below.
Do you have a question for us? Ask away by replying to this post!
Grace Yen / Senior Product Manager
for Audio on Unreal Engine and UEFN.
Grace has been working in games ( mostly in AAA space ) for over 18 years and specializes in game engine technologies. In her role, she actively seeks feedback from users and brings it back to the dev team to shape future releases and the overall roadmap + vision for audio.
Michael Kamper / Audio Director. Michael has been creating audio for games for over 20 years. He is currently the Audio Director on UEFN.
Dave Axelgard / Product Director, IP. Dave has been building digital rights products for 13 years, working to make content ecosystems of all kinds safe, productive and mutually beneficial for both content owners and creators. At Epic, he’s focused on building rights enablement tools for UEFN.
Panda Parkes / Senior Audio Programmer. Panda has been working in games for almost 10 years, with a focus on reducing friction in the development process. He has been working on UEFN since the start of the year, providing dedicated audio engineering support for the Audio Player and Audio Mixer devices.
Josh Dieckmann / Senior QA Analyst. With 10 years at Epic and 16 years in the game industry, Josh has worked on nearly every aspect of the Fortnite ecosystem. Currently deployed as embedded test support for audio and source control implementation within the UEFN toolset.
AMA GUIDELINES:
Use the Reply button at the bottom. Please read through the questions to see if your question has already been asked, before posting your own.
Please do not reply to anyone else’s post—replies should only come from Epic. If you’d like to discuss a related topic in more detail, create a new topic.
Keep in mind, this is not a support session. Questions that are specific to your islands, account, or troubleshooting will be removed.
Don’t forget to have fun!
Posts not following these guidelines may be removed by moderators to keep the AMA flowing smoothly. Thank you!
Fortnite sets the bar fairly high for audio (spatially where actions are occurring, and the variety of audio it uses) - it can be big part of the game.
I started with some robots on the ground floor of a building with a walking sound. After adding a couple more floors I found they were clearly audible on the third floor - yikes.
My solution at this point is to have two audio player devices (on each robot) one at full volume, the second at half volume. As a player moves around I register them on the full volume devices for any robots in the same room as the player and register them on the half volume devices for any robots in adjacent rooms to the player.
This is working, and it’s effective enough, but kind of tedious - and I’m wondering if I’ll hit a limit on audio player devices / resources.
Is this a reasonable approach at this time (with current UEFN capabilities)?
What do you think will be coming in the future (near and/or far) to enhance what we can do in UEFN in this area?
I’m also considering adding a third audio player device with half volume muffled bassy audio to use for a player in a room below a robot.
Music plays a large part in the “feel” of an island / game. With UEFN, we can import our own, but for FNC users, the current selection feels thematically restricted. Will we be getting more music in the near future?
Epic has created some amazing ambient soundscapes for Battle Royale and Save The World over the years, and I personally feel that our lack of those professional assets in Creative is one the main things stopping us from creating highly immersive experiences.
With how audio currently works in UEFN / Fortnite Creative mode, there is absolutely no way to make convincing spatial audio and ambient soundscapes. A big example is that there is currently no means to effectively control where audio gets muffled (i.e. underwater, nature sounds quieter in buildings, sounds quieter in another room, etc.)
There are also concerns of running into copyright infringement issues when importing external sounds, including those that were even purchased for use or fall under CC / royalty free use - I see talk often in the community of games getting denied for sounds they own or have full access to use.
With all these in mind, do you have any tips to help us with addressing these issues on our own? Many of us are solo creators, and cannot put the time in to learn audio creation, nor do we have the budget to hire someone to do so for us.
Will epic ever provide their ambient soundscapes to us as a device with a zone, or an option in the game settings? I feel that the average quality of games would improve significantly with easy access to professional environment audio.
Is there any plan on letting us play the same sound multiple times at once from a single audio player device?
currently we can only play one instance of a sound at a time per audio device with the controls of having it either do nothing when triggered or the device to restart the audio, but we do not have the ability to make it play the sound again, overlapping the current sound playing.
Additionally, is the ability to add Audio Components to Blueprint Classes planned?
Are we capable of combining background audio (with audio device) and layering sequencer audio on top for cinematics with and without camera tracks? Would love to have looping island audio with combat or boss audio stacked for fight scenes
Any plans to add voice chat device? It would be cool to provide us the ability to apply filters/modifiers for voice chat on the fly, so voice can change based on player role/class.
Currently, it is very hard to get your custom audio such as music into your projects as you instantly get hit with a rejection when publishing. even if you follow all the rules and guidelines or even make your own music. Is there a plan to make more audio pass through the moderation process?
Is there any plans to add custom trigger sounds to the Signal Remote Manager device in UEFN? I dont really like the new sound that got added to the updated Remote Explosives that changed the Signal Remotes and maybe other stuff so i would love to change it to the old one
What is the intended difference between Radio and Audio Players? Audio Players can play looped sounds if Sound Cue is configured to loop, and have more attenuation settings, so they seem directly superior for most scenarios.
What are the recommendations on including audio as part of reusable prop blueprints? Since radio and audio players are devices, it is not clear how to include them into custom “Building Prop” blueprints. And blueprint-friendly Audio Components do not seem to be supported.
What is the best way to see and understand how audio is affected by walls?
How do we add custom accessibility icons to our sounds, similar to Fortnite’s “Visualize Sound Effects” feature?
Sound Cue editor in Unreal seems to have more nodes/settings than UEFN one. Is there a plan to bring them to feature parity?
Are we allowed to use non-collaboration Fortnite music in our maps (such as the Henchmen music from ch2s2 and/or the Gumball music pack from ch3 - 2 random examples) or would this be a violation of copyright? Where do Epic’s copyright boundaries extend to in general (if possible can you give some detail for all media types)?
A few of our Clients (music company´s) of Team Mapshot, waiting that they can sign something to make maps in UEFN.
Because in the moment is impossible to create a real music expirience due no music can be uploaded with Copyright. but if the Copyrightholder want to do a map is sadly still not possible because it get straight away denied.
Will there ever be a way to have audio continue to play when the player is out of range? For example, if you have a song play, and you walk out of range 6 seconds in, and come back 2 seconds later, the song will be 8 seconds in. Currently, walking out of range just restarts the song.
Will you ever allow the use of copyright audio with monetization turned off, similar to YouTube? Licensed tracks can make an experience feel much more professional.
Thanks in advance
