We’ve noticed that there seems to be a global volume decrease of -3 dB on all sounds played by default. So far we’ve compensated for it in the master sound class by setting its volume to X and added a limiter on the master submix to be safe. We need the default volume to be 0 dB, because we’re importing all our dialog at -23 LUFS and mixing everything else around that.
- What is the intent behind the -3 dB decrease? Perhaps we’re going about mixing the wrong way?
- If we want to edit the value, where can we find it? In an ini-file perhaps?
Yes, there is an .ini file with a per-platform headroom that does apply a -3 dB by default.
Search your INI files for it:
; Defines a platform-specific volume headroom (in dB) for audio to provide better platform consistency with respect to volume levels.
PlatformHeadroomDB=-3
The purpose of it is legacy at this point. Long ago we had a different totally separate audio rendering pipeline per platform. Then once we moved to the audio mixer (mulitplatform audio renderer), we had a ton of existing content from projects that were tuned to this headroom.
The purpose of the headroom was to balance audio across different platforms and to provide “headroom” to avoid clipping without relying on a master compressor.
It’s vesitigial at this point and you can bypass it.
I’ll make a JIRA to remove this headroom on new projects and log something on init that your game has this applied so it’s easier for you to know about it and remove if you want.
Sounds great! Thanks for the quick answer.