User-triggered animnotify sounds randomly refusing to play

We haven’t heard any reports of anim notifies not working with audio – as you might expect, we use them quite a bit in paragon and fortnite.

After moving to 4.11, I initially had audio occlusion enabled. This caused sounds to repeatedly start/stop during playback so I disabled it on everything.

I know this isn’t what you’re specifically asking about, but if you have a case where occlusion is causing this, I’d like to know. All it should do is either attenuate the volume of a sound that is occluded or add a low-pass filter. It shouldn’t start or stop a sound. Though I suppose if you’re occluding a looping sound and it attenuates to a low-enough volume that it’s then voice stolen, then when there’s room again in the voice-pool, it could restart. In that case though, I’d believe that would be the expected behavior. It’s possible that I can add a flag to a sound that would prevent a voice from ever being stolen due to the voice limit.

Since the 4.11 update, the sounds have randomly refused to play when pressing the roar key.

So I don’t know the audio scene for your game, but in 4.11, there is a slight change to how the global voice pool does it’s voice sorting and it’s possible that you might have to adjust your audio a bit. Before, the voice sorting was performed entirely by priority (which almost nobody used, and is likely set to 1.0 in your case). This means that it was hard to control what actually became an audible playing sound and what wasn’t. We decided to switch that to a volume-scaled priority so louder sounds will naturally have “higher priority”. However, you can still set a sound to be a high priority sound (you can set the priority to any number between 0 and 100) and this should result in the sound getting sorted higher and not voice-stolen.

This tech, btw, combines with the focus feature so a sound behind can be reduced in priority (and thus voice-stolen in favor of higher priority sounds).