Major - UEFN - Audio options are very limited, obscure and unnecessarily complicated

General Issues and Bug Reporting
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There are so many issues with audio right now, in both Creative and UEFN.

Options in all of the audio devices will either miss a critical setting, or have some sort of issue associated with them. There are cases for audio where no device is useful, but I will explain everything in detail below.

First, I want to mention a couple of common use cases for sound:

  1. Ambient sound from a source. Typically used by machinery. Requires autoplay, attenuation, and to link to Fortnite’s SFX audio channel.

  2. Music

  • Use case i: Used globally, while playing. Autoplay, no attenuation, links to Fortnite’s Music audio channel (or cinematics channel).

  • Use case ii: Used in zones. Autoplay while in audio zone, no attenuation, requires transition when going outside the zone, links to Fortnite’s Music audio channel (or cinematics channel).

  • Use case iii: Layers. Autoplay of two tracks that layer based on gameplay status (think normal music and combat music). Player instigated. Both tracks are always synced for the transition to work. Gameplay cues the transition (needs inputs for engaging or leaving a status - not supported atm).

  • Use case iv: Complex transitions based on gameplay and time cues. Think Wwise stuff (I don’t have experience with this category, but I’ll leave it here for reference). Not supported by the current set of tools.

  1. Area Ambience
    Same as music, only this one ties to the SFX channel instead of the Music one.
  • Use case i: Used globally
  • Use case ii: Used in zones

  1. Music Stinger
    Used for highlighting game events. No attenuation, may require player/team-instigated activation.

  2. Gameplay Sound Effects
    The most common gameplay audio. Triggered by player action (for example, opening a door). May require player/team instigation to play. Tied to gameplay (requires input). Has attenuation, and links to SFX Fortnite audio channel.

The above examples will be referenced below with all the audio devices in Creative/UEFN, so here we go:

RADIO DEVICE (1,2i)

Pros
Autoplay
Attenuation
Simple to use and setup
Can play in pre-game

Cons
Doesn’t play custom audio (due to a bug, functionality is there)
Doesn’t instigate audio (bugged, functionality is there)
Changes music after 3 hrs of playtime (old Creative bug)
Restarts if:
-A loud sound is played
-The player is eliminated
-Player alt+tabs out of Fortnite

SPEAKER DEVICE (4,5)

Pros
Can instigate a pool of players or team
Attenuation
Allows restarting sfx without cooldown
Can loop (only custom audio)
Supports custom audio

Cons
Cannot instigate specific players, only pool of players
No autoplay
Cannot be activated in pre-game (devices don’t work in pre-game)

AUDIO PLAYER DEVICE (4,5)

Same as Speaker Device, with the added:

Pros
Addition of Pitch function

Cons
Looped audio will loop before it ends normally
Looped audio will randomly loop while playing

AUDIO ZONE ()

Currently, it doesn’t have any settings, so it cannot be used

SEQUENCER AUDIO (4,5)

Pros
Can be instigated (untested!)

Cons
Complicated to use
No audio attenuation
Doesn’t tie to any Fortnite audio channel

GENERAL AUDIO DEVICE ISSUES:

  1. Radios set to custom audio wont play that custom audio: https://i.imgur.com/j1gXEfc.jpeg Radios have “autoplay” by default, which the other devices don’t and helps to quickly set up ambient sounds and music. They also link audio to Fortnite’s Music channel and has attenuation

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  1. Audio speakers can’t be activated in pre-game (because Creative logic doesn’t work in pregame, not sure about Verse) meaning I can’t have an ambient track playing in Pre-game, because nothing can trigger the speaker (goes back to autoplay not being a thing in them)

  2. Same with the new audio player ^

  3. I haven’t found a use for the AudioVolume, is this something you use with blueprints or can we use it somehow? https://i.imgur.com/EX6peJQ.jpeg

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  1. Sound Cues and Sound Waves dragged directly into the scene will have no attenuation and will not respect Fortnite’s music and SFX audio settings

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  1. Can’t have audio be used in sequencers in pre-game either, because sequencers can’t be triggered in pre-game in general (there is no setting to do that)

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  1. Any audio played by the radio device/audio player device will restart if: -A loud sound is played -Player is eliminated -Player alt+tabs out of Fortnite This makes any music desync, so you can’t make a cutscene, music with layers (for combat) or a voice dialogue be synced to anything in-game (edited).

  2. Also audio player device doesn’t respect music/sfx/cinematics audio levels and restarts every time you enter options or hit apply in options.

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Bumping coz this is major.

I have had all the same issues.

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@Wertandrew Thank you so much for taking the time to write up this feedback, and to @Cardin for bumping it. The work in Audio continues to evolve as we take in user feedback and I wanted to take this opportunity to provide a few updates for the areas we can provide a bit more clarity to.

The Audio Player device by design allows for imported audio, whereas we haven’t opened up the Radio device for imported audio. We hear you that auto-play is a valuable feature, and have included this in our backlog.

Audio Volumes are now hidden as we are still working on what functionality to expose. A form of Audio Gameplay Volumes will probably be the next target. Audio Gameplay Volumes Overview | Unreal Engine 5.0 Documentation

We have recently brought in some changes to prevent users from dragging ambient actors into the scene ( 24.00 ). The approach to add audio will be to use the Audio Player device which has the ability to add attenuation.

A new Audio Mixer device has been recently added to allow you to add your imported audio to control buses, and control the volume of your control buses ( also with attack time and release time ). This mechanism will also allow us to categorize future audio content we include into pre-determined control buses so users can control those as groups and not have to tag each one individually.

For item 7, did you happen to have lots of sounds playing when this happened? One thing that was brought up by one of our team members is that the user doesn’t currently have a way to set priority on the sounds. So you have background audio that you want to remain priority, and not get bumped out we don’t have way to do this at the moment. It’s on our radar now.

We are still looking at feedback regarding pre-game states and playback. Will post more updates when available.

Thanks again for the feedback!

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Thankyou Grace!

One question,

I have found a workaround with CUE actors to have controllable attenuation, occlusion etc and have deployed it throughout my map.
Will the removal of this function invalidate the existing CUE actors in my map?

To be perfectly honest I am not a fan of the approach of disabling legacy and so called “pro” methods that existed in UE just to replace them with hand holding style devices. I am working out workarounds and methods that work, just to have them disabled or changed. This mindset led to the cmd line being disabled in UEFN for the reason of “we probably won’t use it”…

I understand that we are in the minority in the scheme of everybody coming over from FNC but I feel that the power of UEFN to lift the bar is being cut off at the knees before it even gets a chance to run.

Also I see UEFN as a way for people to transition from UEFN to full blown UE devs… Redesigning features to be Fortnite device compatible and then removing/disabling the “UE” methods just seems to be very short sighted. Not to mention it is invalidating thousands of hours of existing tutorials.

Sorry for my rant, It’s just becoming quite hard to roll with the punches…

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@Cardin Thank you again for providing feedback - it really helps us steer effort and understand where we can improve.

Our vision is to open up the power of the UE toolset in UEFN. We had to take a staged approach for open beta and at this point have prioritized efforts with the Audio Player device for open beta. Longer term, we will continue to build on more ways to open up audio features without devices ( such as through verse APIs to play audio ). Other examples on our roadmap include plans to work on exposing MetaSounds support, and looking into supporting Audio Gameplay Volumes.

Specifically for disabling ambient sounds, we felt this was the right approach for open beta to give us more space to gather feedback as we weren’t certain this was a good design. Users had very little control over ambient sound actors in UEFN ( compared with UE for example where they could use Blueprint for example to control playing audio ). Unfortunately it does mean that any maps created with ambient sound actors will need to be updated to use Audio Player devices ( one-time cost ) before they can be published.

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To add to the above, I believe the end result and what really matters is having a lot of control with audio, while having an easy and flexible process to develop. I do believe that devices are the best way to go, IF they become as flexible/powerful as their meta sound equivalent. Tutorials will also be done again, I don’t think that’s an issue Cardin, I feel the point is that the process becomes more modern so that a new user can easily follow up without needing a tutorial in the first place. Once that’s done, the process will become easier and faster, helping speed up development while retaining all existing features.

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Hey Grace, while I understand the want for only receiving feedback on the Audio Device at the start of Public Beta, and this is fine, I don’t think blocking the ability to use it in the world if it’s already there is a good idea.

For example a map we’re working on has most likely hundreds, if not thousands of Audio Cue actors in the world, and if we have to replace them all with Audio Devices to publish, which will be, first off a really slow and painful process because some of these Audio Cues have been added as Components inside some of our Building Props, it will also introduce a huge cost in memory which we had not taken into consideration.

Regarding the “little control” players will have, which is true and certainly hard to tackle, most of us playing with audio have already found many workarounds to this, such as moving Audio Cues high into the sky through Sequencer. And I’m sure most players who try to use these will either: 1, find another trick like the one I mentioned before and use that, or 2, give up with Audio Cues and instead use the Audio Device.

I also much more prefer using Audio Cues in the world for Audio that I know will always be there, I’ve already done my settings in the Audio Cue itself and I’d rather not have to put down a device to play this.

Speaking about the Device itself, in its current state, it is not ready to be replacing Audio Cues, and neither is the Radio Device for example, during my testing with both of these, the “Unregister Player” and “Deactivate” option for neither of them worked.
The Radio had even worse problems, with Audio not playing, it defaulting to the “Fortnite” track, etc.
I personally don’t think these 2 are any better than Cues, at least in our current version of the Engine (23.40), if these fixes were to come into place in a later version, that would be a little better, but still not preferrable than using Cues, for my use cases.

If this is confirmed for an upcoming patch and cannot be changed at this time, I understand, but if you could still bring this up as feedback for this decision to be reconsidered at a later date, I, and I think many others, would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you!

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@Rynex_FNC Including ambient sound actors is something we are turning off for the time being in open beta as this would prevent new users from using workarounds as you have described and creating more content that might have to be updated. It’s still something we will monitor closely as we continue to collect feedback.

In the meantime, our team is looking into making an update for open beta so that any projects with existing ambient sound actors in it already can still work ( but you just won’t be able to add new ones ). This would provide a bit of run way for users with existing content done this way. There might be edge cases where something won’t work, but we can try a few scenarios out to evaluate. Can you clarify this scenario for us “Audio Cues have been added as Components inside some of our Building Props”. Is there a screenshot you can share or steps you can provide for us to test it out on our end?

On quick spot checking of the audio player device memory usage compared with ambient sound actors, they appeared comparable. Are you seeing something different on your end? We can investigate more.

Lastly, we’ll look into the “Unregister Player” and “Deactivate” options not working. They should.

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Hey Grace!
This is good to know, really happy about it.

Regarding this:

You can basically do this with any custom asset that has been turned into a Building Prop, the way we do it is the following:

  • Import your assets, textures, etc.
  • Create a new blueprint class which will house all the components.
  • Go inside the component view of the Blueprint, and drag an Audio Cue inside, this will make it so every time the Blueprint actor is dragged into the world, the Audio Cue is placed with it.

I did not know this, I thought the Device would take up more because of its asset, mesh and textures. Good to know, thank you.

And finally:

I’m not entirely sure why these didn’t work, but I never got them to work, I made sure a player was instigating through a button and they still didn’t respond to it, while every other device linked to that same button did.

Thank you!

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Would love to know if this has been talked about again after Public release, including nodes missing from Sound Cues :slight_smile:

Thanks.

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Hey @Rynex_FNC - we recently did a pass on fixing some bugs with unregistering and activating / de-activating devices. It should be available on next release. Please let us know if you are still experiencing issues after the next update.

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Any updates on the Device settings ? A lot of the Creative devices have ambient audio that is almost ruining games. For example, in any of the Horror games, placing a creature spawner means letting your players know obviously there are fiends. I need a way to disable that. It should not be that hard to do.

Anywhere I go, even verse, its not letting us expose and/or disable the sound. It is soo annoying. None of the workarounds have given results to somehow null the ambient sound.

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+1 on the above. Only workaround I can think atm is to place the creature placer instead of the creature spawner, or place the spawner high up and have them fall down, so the base doesn’t emit the ambient sound.

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@PaulonCall thank you for the feedback. I’m currently reviewing all the creative devices to identify the ones that do not have an option to disable audio. Are there other devices aside from the Creature Spawner device where this would be useful?

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@GraceYen Thank you so much for the update. Ill drop into a quick session and let you know about the same. I am so glad some one is actively looking into it.

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@GraceYen 1. Creature Spawner -

Things that I have tested -
A ) Taking tour of all the available settings, under all the available actors and child actors.

B) Checking Fortnite UEFN Documentation on Verse and understanding what settings can be exposed - ( Sound settings are not a listed option )

C) Trying to change the Visibility and invisibility settings of the Devivce, through its settings, or via UEFN going into the Mesh and disabling the visible render option.

D) Trying to replace the Creature spawner Mesh with something else, assuming if the sound was embedded into the mesh itself, then changing the mesh should fix it. This did not work as Mesh is not the issue.

After extensive tinkering, I have found that the sound is embeded into the Spawn point Node Verse -

Begin Object Class=/Script/Engine.SceneComponent Name=“SpawnPoint” ExportPath=/Script/Engine.SceneComponent’“/Engine/Transient.SpawnPoint”’
UCSSerializationIndex=0
bNetAddressable=True
CreationMethod=SimpleConstructionScript
End Object

Screenshot -

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image989×720 111 KB

  1. Creature Placer - Same things tested as above

  2. Props from the Blimp Gallery -

For Example -

The Display screen, The computer builds, the fans, as described in the very beginning of the thread, has ambient sounds.

Screenshot of the props -

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There is more to it than I have found today. This has been a small and annoying issue that we were hoping would not be an issue when working on advanced tools like UEFN. In my past 3 years of making FN Creative maps, I have always made my way around using these props, to avoid any kind of such ambient sounds. However when making a zombie map, the use of Creature spawner or placer is an unavoidable instance.

I hope this helps.

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Thanks for the additional feedback. I’ll share this back with our team :slight_smile:

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How about simple play, pause, and mute buttons and a simple callback for OnAudioFinishedPlaying. It doesn’t seem like it should be that difficult.