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HELP: How to use different sounds dependent on location... Have no clue where to start.

Development Discussion Blueprint Visual Scripting
#1

So I’ve been a Production artist for several years now, but am just getting my feet wet when it comes to Blueprints and I know very little coding.

My current dilemma is that I want an action to trigger a particular sound effect, which is not something to difficult to do in and of itself. But I would like to have the action play a different audio file depending on location.

Here’s an example of what a this would consist of. Say my character has a handgun, he/she fires the gun outdoors in a field, there may be a lot of echo, but not all that much reverberation. However, say he/she shoots the same gun in a tunnel, the sound will have a much greater reflective rate to to it being a much smaller area and will result in more prevalent reverb.

My first that was to maybe create invisible trigger boxes to encompass areas that I want a different effect for. But again, I’m not entirely sure how to approach it.

P. S.: I’m very well aware that there is a Reverb actor, but I don’t want to use it for numerous reasons. The main two being that #1. I am a perfectionist and get extremely irked if the things I make are not up to the quality I expect from my work, so I’d rather use the files that I have spent weeks fine-tuning than anything else. #2. While I have never used the Reverb actor, my guess is that because of performance concerns it will either be really poor quality and take little performance or it will be higher quality and use more resources.

Thank you very much to all who’ve taken the time to read this!

#2

Hey Riley,

I’m not 100% on this, but I’m sure one of the better methods of doing this would be using trigger boxes with overlap events as well as you could make custom variables that are defined by those specific areas to decide which sound effect needs to get played (still would be using trigger boxes). Example;

bIsInTunnel (b = boolean)
bIsOutside
bIsInCave
bIsUnderwater

etc etc

Basically I’d imagine it would look something like this;

Event begin overlap with the specific trigger box, grab a reference to the playerpawn/AI you want to trigger the sound effect (trigger box would need to encompass the whole area obviously where you want the different sound effect to play), branch (setup the condition via a variable, specifically a boolean), if the condition is true, then play the desired sound effect at location. That is essentially the very basics of how I would personally approach it initially. You could easily expand from there and add in more checks/variables to control it even further. I’m with you on being a perfectionist and not wanting to settle for less than desired, so I agree on avoiding the reverb node when you’ve already got the sound design and reverb exactly how you want it.

I didn’t try this myself in UE, as I’m currently a bit behind on my own work, but I figured at the least I could provide my theory on how to approach it as a confirmation. If you end up having any issues with this, let me know, and I’ll try to provide some assistance in figuring out the kinks surrounding the details with it.

  • Sinari
#3

Bump on this.

I feel this is a very overlooked aspect of game design nowadays, however DICE has crushed this and made their weapon sounds very, very immersive and impressive. In a canyon, your submachine gun will echo and reverb back to you several times, but in a large valley, you will hear the sound crack and dissipate slowly. It’s an amazing representation of reality. I want to implement this into a game one day, and while it may go unnoticed, I know that it will add to the design of the game immensely.

Anyone have an idea of how to do this to where a weapon (or reload, or speech pattern, etc) sound would sound differently based off of the environment that the player is in, automatically? Thank you!