Oh yikes, just ran into that “phonon probe volumes have collision” issue. Guess nobody’s using those until 4.17 
Hey there folks, hope this is the right place as I don’t think this may be an issue for tracking.
Im in 4.16.1 and I don’t see any occlusion or reverb plugin settings in my audio component like it says I should in the manual.
Is this a version issue or am I missing something?
Help apreciated
Hey
My guess is that you’re not running the editor with the -audiomixer command line argument. Hope that helps.
Oh snap! Thanks, that did it. I cant believe ive missed that. hangs head in shame
No worries! Do that myself sometimes.
Hey folks, just a heads up that there are a good number of changes in the 4.17 preview - would love any feedback you all have! We tried to focus on the big ones that would block people from shipping with it (probe volumes colliding, packaging problems, etc). Be sure to grab the updated manual, as some processes have changed (scene export, in particular). You can read the announcement here.
Thanks Freeman.
Any thought been put into hooking the phonon material stuff into the existing PhysicalMaterial system? Most UE4 projects, I expect, would already be using that system (it’s kind of the equivalent of Source’s $surfaceprop) so it’d make sense to fall back to a setting in the physmat in the absence of an otherwise-specified phonon material. Much more plug-and-play with existing projects.
Hey ,
Yup, that is on the radar for future releases - we’d like to use existing systems as much as possible. Using physical materials as a default of some sort is a good idea. In the immediate future (4.18), priority will be given to any stability issues and platform support (Android, OSX, Linux).
Awesome, looking forward to it Love your work!
Reverb
@freeman_valve: The realtime reverb effect in my scene is so subtle I can hardly tell if is on or off, even setting indirect contribution to 10 and all walls to ceramic. Am I missing something? How can I debug possible issues?
Unfortunately, there isn’t too much you can do right now to debug. You can do the following:
- Make sure no errors are appearing in the log.
- Try temporarily increasing quality settings (rays and bounces) to see if you get a more powerful IR.
- Try baking the source if it’s static.
I’ve added an issue to our GitHub to add some debugging utilities, here: [UE4] Indirect Debugging Utilities · Issue #43 · ValveSoftware/steam-audio · GitHub
Hi there. I’m trying to get Steam Audio working. I followed the instructions to get it set up, I added the -audiomixer command, so the shortcut target is now B:\UE_4.17\Engine\Binaries\Win64\UE4Editor.exe -audiomixer I activated the steam plugin and restarted it. Now I set my default phonon to a really obvious one like concrete to test it out. (And I added phonon geometry to a few bits of the map to be on the safe side, I don’t understand what the difference between photon material and photon geometry is), and when I played I didn’t hear any reflections. Then I noticed that I have to export the scene, in Build>Phonon>Export scene. But this option does not show up in my build menu, does this mean I haven’t integrated properly?
Hey Ashton,
Be sure to grab the latest manual, here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-audio/releases/download/v2.0-beta.6/steamaudio_manual_unreal_2.0-beta.6.pdf
The scene export changed from 4.16 to 4.17. It now involves using a PhononScene actor. These details can be found in the manual.
Phonon Geometry components indicate to Steam Audio that the mesh should be included in acoustic calculations. Adding a Phonon Material without a Phonon Geometry will not have any effect.
aha! Gotcha. Thanks so much Freeman 
Me again. Got the propagation reverb working the editor and it sounds sweet! Only problem is though that when I package the game and play the build, the reverb is not there. It builds all fine except I get this error: LogStats: Warning: MetaData mismatch. Did you assign a stat to two groups? New //STATGROUP_Threads//AudioMixerRenderThread///Thread_32b0_0///####STATCAT_Advanced#### old //STATGROUP_Threads//AudioMixerRenderThread///Thread_2ef0_0///####STATCAT_Advanced####
Thanks for all your help!
Oh found the answer. I didn’t realise you needed to launch the build with -audiomixer as well.
Cool - glad you got it sorted out. 
Hey! I’m building a VR game in which players can spawn a floating shield. I want the shield to significantly occlude sound, but I can’t seem to get it to have any impact. In the blueprint details window for BP_Shield, the PhononGeometryComponent claims 0 triangles and 0 vertices.
As far as I can tell, air occlusion and level occlusion are working normally otherwise.
The shield is dynamically spawned and destroyed on the press of a button, and is about as big as a real kite shield. Is there anything else I need to do to get this working? Thanks!
Hi All
I was wondering if it was possible to use Steam audio in the following way:
I want to have an audio source behind a door, occluded. Then, when the door is opened, the amount of occlusion decreases based on how far the door is open (this is a VR project).
I’ve tested a few things, but as of yet have had no luck achieving this.
It seems as though the occlusion properties don’t travel with the actor (Door), but are instead static in the scene - so even if the actor moves, the Occlusion ‘area’ doesn’t move with it.
Is this how it is currently working, or is there a way to achieve this?
Any thought appreciated
Thanks
@Zenteran @stevejlane Actually, both of these situations require Steam Audio to support dynamic geometry. As it stands, we work only with static scene geometry. It is possible to support dynamic geometry by routing our raytracer callbacks to the UE4 raytracer. I’ve experimented with this, and occlusion appears to give reasonable results. Getting indirect sound to work with the UE4 raytracer will be a challenge, however. In the next update of Steam Audio, I’ll include the glue code that routes our raytracer calls to the UE4 raytracer, but it will be disabled by default and require the end user to compile on their own.
TLDR: If you need dynamic geometry support anytime soon, we can’t give guarantees. However, it is possible and is something we’re looking at.