there’s been a couple of outlying reports from our users of footsteps being inaudible.
As I said, I suspect in these cases, your footsteps are getting voice-stolen by other higher-priority sounds (or sounds with bigger volumes). So by default, UE4 only plays 32 sounds at once (in total). If 33 sounds try to play, it needs to resolve the conflict. To do that, it priority-sorts all active sounds according to the product of their volume (after computing every gain stage) and the sound’s priority. If the new sound (#33) ends up being sorted higher than every other sound, it’ll play and the sound at the bottom of the sorted list will be stopped. If the new sound is lower priority after the sort, it won’t play. In normal cases for a game, hundreds of sounds are trying to play and only the top-sorted 32 are actually played.
So if all your sounds are the exact same priority (e.g. 1.0), then this sort is purely by volume. This means that if a footstep is occurring relatively far away at a lower volume while other higher-volume sounds are playing, it’s possible that the footstep will be sorted past the
This is probably fine for most cases, but if you want a given sound to have a almost guaranteed chance of getting sorted at the top of the list, you should set your priority to be higher than 1.0 (e.g. 50.0, or even 100.0).