Hi guys and gals.
I’m just about to get into making audio for my game. I was wondering what’s the level of management I have to do in code with my sounds, for example in my old engine I had to constantly monitor what sounds to play and when to unload them from the memory etc. Does unreal handle that for you?
For example if I set up a 1000 ambient sounds with attenuation, is it smart enough not to pass them to the sound card if player is out of range? Or will it eat resources and it’s better to spawn sounds dynamically around the player and optimize?
You can set up 1000 sources if you prefer. Setting up “concurrency,” you get to choose a limit of sounds, and if it kills older or further away sounds first etc.
At the project level you can set a maximum number of Active Sounds, the default is 32. Depending on your min-spec, you may wish to raise this or lower this as needed.
That means the Engine will only play the top 32 Active Sounds.
Priority on this is determined as a calculation of Volume (a linear scalar value between 0.0 and 1.0) x Priority (an assignable value between 0.0 and 100.0).
Priority allows you to prioritize sounds when they are quiet over louder sounds in the case where it needs to be heard over louder sounds.
With your 1,000 ambient sounds scenario, depending on your attenuation, the sort will play the top 32 Active Sounds.
Active Sounds is an important distinction because some sound base objects, like the Sound Cue, can play more than one Active Sound at a time. So it’s important to evaluate your overall performance as you’re putting your level together using debug monitoring (like stat sounds, stat soundwaves, stat soundcues, etc.) to help you identify which sounds are prioritized at any given time.