Unreal Engine 4.16 Preview

[DamirH]

Hey @.reynolds, just a quick question - would it be advisable for a project that is entering full-scale production that is estimated to take almost 2 years in about 3 months to start with the new audio features? No extensive audio work has been done yet and I believe that by the time we start extensive audio work the new engine will be production ready.

[anonymous_user_f2b8b290]

I posted a new thread to talk about Volumetric Fog here:

Volumetric Fog feedback thread

I will post some replies there.

[dan.reynolds]

@DamirH;700286

Hey @.reynolds, just a quick question - would it be advisable for a project that is entering full-scale production that is estimated to take almost 2 years in about 3 months to start with the new audio features? No extensive audio work has been done yet and I believe that by the time we start extensive audio work the new engine will be production ready.

Great question! The nice thing is that it’s very easy to move back and forth between the two audio engines currently.

You can simply activate it on launch with “-audiomixer” in your commandline.

We expect the new Audio Engine to become default once we’ve finalized the design and all of the back-end implementations are complete.

At the very least, I think it would be a good idea for you to play around with the new features to get a handle on the direction Aaron and the team is taking this new engine. This will help inform your decisions moving forward with your own games’ audio design vision and how useful the new Audio Engine will be for your project.

The new features we’ve already shown off are very powerful, but they’re also quite flashy and don’t come for free.

As we refine the features and direction of the new Audio Engine, we may introduce new paradigms for traditional workflows that could prove incompatible with the old approaches, though it’s difficult to say for sure–there are definitely a lot of legacy features we have our eye on improving or replacing with more streamlined systems or approaches.

However, nothing is quite set in stone–the design is fluid, and this is why we’re currently keeping the new Audio Engine as experimental/early access.

I can’t comment specifically to timelines (because I’m not completely sure), though we are eager to switch over.

Until then, I recommend experimenting yourself–get a feel for what we’re starting to do, and decide what will be useful for your project.

[rich0550]

When packing a mobile project, I get this

Can’t make an APK without API ‘android-23’ minimum installed

I installed the CodeWorksforAndroid-1R5-windows.exe that was in the directory no luck

this was working in 4.15 what to do? thanks!

[anonymous_user_8bfce34f1 (anonymous_user_8bfce34f)]

Hello,
I just played a little with the SplineIk and and am noticing some un-expected behaviour.
I made a separate post over in ‘Animation’ about it. The new 4.16 Spline Ik and skinning - Character & Animation - Epic Developer Community Forums

Cheers,

[Chaoss]

The new audio system (I did enable it in the ini) seems particularly bad for a modern engine, there is no spatialisation or audio occlusion (that works). I really like the other improvements though good job!

[Agni78]

I would like developers to make a correctly working plug-in to work with joysticks. If this engine can do fighting games, then it should be possible to connect 2 or more joysticks at the same time. And preferably with vibration. We will hope that this will be heard.

[DamirH]

@.reynolds;700300

Great question! The nice thing is that it’s very easy to move back and forth between the two audio engines currently.

You can simply activate it on launch with “-audiomixer” in your commandline.

We expect the new Audio Engine to become default once we’ve finalized the design and all of the back-end implementations are complete.

At the very least, I think it would be a good idea for you to play around with the new features to get a handle on the direction Aaron and the team is taking this new engine. This will help inform your decisions moving forward with your own games’ audio design vision and how useful the new Audio Engine will be for your project.

The new features we’ve already shown off are very powerful, but they’re also quite flashy and don’t come for free.

As we refine the features and direction of the new Audio Engine, we may introduce new paradigms for traditional workflows that could prove incompatible with the old approaches, though it’s difficult to say for sure–there are definitely a lot of legacy features we have our eye on improving or replacing with more streamlined systems or approaches.

However, nothing is quite set in stone–the design is fluid, and this is why we’re currently keeping the new Audio Engine as experimental/early access.

I can’t comment specifically to timelines (because I’m not completely sure), though we are eager to switch over.

Until then, I recommend experimenting yourself–get a feel for what we’re starting to do, and decide what will be useful for your project.

Thanks for the detailed info. As I said, any serious audio work is at least 6 months in the future for us, so I believe the best thing to do for now is wait and see how things develop before committing.

[dan.reynolds]

@Chaoss;700344

The new audio system (I did enable it in the ini) seems particularly bad for a modern engine, there is no spatialisation or audio occlusion (that works). I really like the other improvements though good job!

Hi Chaoss,

I’m not sure what difficulties you have run up against. The new Audio Engine has standard speaker panning (with optional Center Channel panning) as well as distance attenuation as well as our simple ray-trace based simple occlusion system. Additionally, the Oculus Audio Plugin’s HRTF as well as the Steam Audio Plugin’s HRTF/Spatialization/Occlusion system are all available.

All of these settings are set in the Sound Attenuation asset (which can then be attached to the Sound Source of your choosing, whether it be a traditional Sound Wave or Sound Cue as well as the new Synths).

If you’re having difficulty setting up attenuation in your project, definitely give us the details–we are committed to ironing out as many bugs as we can!

Thanks,

[iniside]

@iniside;700149

How do I turn mesh section to cloth ? On GDC video just selected section, right click add cloth asset. I can’t even select mesh section in viewport ;/.

Ok it works, just doesn’t work on master.
Have mesh with existing cloth. So i cant add new, my only option is to remove cloth asset, but it seems it doesn’t work. I click it and nothing happen ;/.

[oglu]

@;699998

It is in there as an experimental plugin. You have to enable it first.

is there any documentation about USD…?

[anonymous_user_d829b65b]

Will there be Auto-LOD for skeletal meshes as well?

[xN31]

Hello , thanks for the info, very useful! I’m very happy to see the new audio engine and the steam audio SDK in this release, I’ve been waiting eagerly for them

A couple of questions:

• How can I double-check if the new Audio Engine is correctly enabled? I set the AudioDeviceModuleName parameter in WindowsEngine.ini the editor’s config folder (not the project one). Is this sufficient or shall I also use the command line parameter?
• How do you tag the static meshes? Is it sufficient to add a component tag with the text “Phonon Geometry Component” in the details panel?
• When I exported the scene the first time there was a dialog asking if I want to import the .obj file generate. Is this necessary? (I didn’t…)
• How can I double-check if occlusion are working properly? In my case either the effect is too subtle (even using 100 as Occlusion Volume Attenuation I cannot tell any difference) or not working at all…
• When I exit from the VR preview with the plugin enabled the editor crashes (only after tagging and exporting the scene as above, before it didn’t)
• I cannot package a win64 executable with Steam Audio enabled, when I try I get the linking error below. Any idea how to fix this?

UnrealBuildTool: UELinkerFixups.cpp.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol “void __cdecl EmptyLinkFunctionForStaticInitializationPhonon(void)” (?EmptyLinkFunctionForStaticInitializationPhonon@@YAXXZ) referenced in function “void __cdecl UELinkerFixups(void)” (?UELinkerFixups@@YAXXZ)

@.reynolds;700247

Hello Mitchell!

Once the Phonon Plugin is enabled, there are several assets that will be available–these are attenuation assets. We found early on that the new Audio Engine already had data on the Sound Source’s world information and so a “Phonon Source” component was unnecessary. Instead, you will want to apply an Attenuation Object to your Sound Source that has Phonon Asset Overrides.

I made the following procedure steps that should still be usable in its current state. However, please keep in mind that we are still working with Valve on refining the implementation and that at the moment the integration is experimental.

Steam Audio Procedures
Spatialized Direct Audio

1. Change Spatialization Parameter on Attenuation Settings to: HRTF Spatialization
2. Create/Add Phonon Spatialization Settings

Enabling Occlusion

1. Tag Occluding Static Meshes with Phonon Geometry Component
2. Export Scene (Under Build Drop-Down Menu)
3. Enable Occlusion on Attenuation Settings
4. Create/Add Phonon Attenuation Settings
5. Set Phonon Attenuation Settings to Raycast or Partial

Enabling Realtime Propagation on a Source Sound

1. Tag Reflective Static Meshes with Phonon Geometry Component
2. Export Scene (Under Build Drop-Down Menu)
3. Create/Add Phonon Reverb Settings to Source’s Attenuation Settings
4. Set Phonon Reverb Settings’ Indirect Simulation Mode to: Realtime

Enabling Baked Propagation on a Source Sound

1. Tag Reflective Static Meshes with Phonon Geometry Component
2. Export Scene (Under Build Drop-Down Menu)
3. Create/Add Phonon Reverb Settings to Source’s Attenuation Settings
4. Set Phonon Reverb Settings’ Indirect Simulation Mode to: Baked
5. Add Phonon Probe Volume to scene
6. Scale Phonon Probe Volume to fit around reverberate space and geometry
7. Set Probe Volume Placement Strategy to: Uniform Distribution
8. Set Horizontal Spacing to something reasonable
9. Click Generate Probes
10. Add a Phonon Source Component to Audio Component
11. Set Phonon Source Component’s Baked Radius to be larger than the sound source’s attenuation range
12. Click Bake Propagation

Enabling Baked Listener Reverb

1. Tag Reflective Static Meshes with Phonon Geometry Component
2. Export Scene (Under Build Drop-Down Menu)
3. Change Global Indirect Simulation Mode to Baked (In Project Settings)
4. Add Phonon Probe Voluem to scene
5. Scale Phonon Probe Volume to fit around reverberate space and geometry
6. Set Probe Volume Placement Strategy to: Uniform Distribution
7. Set Horizontal Spacing to something reasonable
8. Click Generate Probes
9. Bake Reverb (Under Build Drop-Down Menu)
   Any sources that have a non-null reverb setting will be routed through this reverb.

EDIT: It’s worth noting that all these new Audio Engine features are Early Access/Experimental at the moment and can only be accessed by enabling the Audio Engine (with commandline it’s -audiomixer).

[Juangea]

Is this going to have any mixed reality related improvements?

I mean, maybe not a full complete mixed reality solution, but a way to extract different cameras from the game to stream them…

Cheers and thanks!

[anonymous_user_d2e4169d]

I created a simple volumetric clouds from new material domain.
watch?v=hxyIvPdO9zQ&feature=youtu.be
I think that there is someway to make it better.

[ioFlow_Studios]

Niiiiice norulex

[Dig_Squid]

@;700457

Will there be Auto-LOD for skeletal meshes as well?

We do want to do this, but we have not had a chance to tackle it yet I’m afraid.

[Jambax]

As for the new Audio Engine, I noticed in Aaron’s demo at GDC he was using an envelope to drive materials.

Are there new Material Nodes available for this or is this purely a Blueprint/C++ implementation? I made a frequency spectrum analyzer in 4.15 with C++, but it relies on storing compressed bulk data of the original .wav as an asset. Being able to read from sound-cues in real time would be nice!

EDIT: Totally gonna abuse the volumetric particle feature… Can these special particles also be driven with textures?

[Nicobass]

What happens with simulated bones on skeletal mesh and translation? it seems to be completely crazy… (like in the very first version of the engine)

[Magneto]

@TheJamsh;700534

As for the new Audio Engine, I noticed in Aaron’s demo at GDC he was using an envelope to drive materials.

Are there new Material Nodes available for this or is this purely a Blueprint/C++ implementation? I made a frequency spectrum analyzer in 4.15 with C++, but it relies on storing compressed bulk data of the original .wav as an asset. Being able to read from sound-cues in real time would be nice!

@.reynolds Im also quite interested in this. Hopefully there’s now an easy way to affect materials and other things using audio.

How do you take the full sound mix you hear and plug that into a light or material for effects?