Quick and dirty question: does Metasound plugin run on Oculus Quest (or Android)?
MetaSounds is platform agnostic – the plugin works on every platform, there are no hardware or platform dependencies.
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That’s awesome, thanks!
The question could be:
- Is MetaSound performant on the Oculus Quest?
- How complicated can we make our MetaSound graphs on a platform like the Quest?
Answered by Aaron Mcleran on 7/22/21 (linked to answer): MetaSounds and Quartz | Inside Unreal - YouTube
**Answered by Aaron @Minus_Kelvin 6/2/22 (linked to answer): Exploring MetaSounds in Lyra | Inside Unreal - YouTube
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I know this is an old post, but this is one of the first to pop up in a google search.
The comments on the video around performance are accurate for high-end platforms like ps5, xbox series x, and high end desktop only. Generally the extra thread for metasounds doesn’t improve performance outside of those platforms because it ends up adding additional overhead for context switching and sharing data across threads.
If the platform is resource constrained such as mobile, vr, low end desktop then stick to using cues because they are still cheaper for those platforms. VR audio can be especially expensive due to spatialization of audio so it’s ideal to keep the total number of audio instances down as well. It is not cost prohibitive to use metasounds, but the cost of doing anything useful with a metasound is pretty substantial so only a small number instances can really be active on resource constrained platforms. That means it can’t be used for sounds that can stack unpredictably like weapon fire in pvp games (example of that issue in lyra : MetaSounds Poor Performance On Mobile).
Metasounds are difficult to give guidance around. Some helpful tips I have found is that the fewer number of audio processing nodes the better. The less sounds that needed to be loaded the better (huge overhead it seems when processing the resulting audio). math that only operates on basic types like floats or integers don’t seem like they would incur a cost so lean more heavily on those where possible. According to their documentation, delay nodes are expensive. I don’t really understand why that would be the case. They are not expensive in cues.