Trigger Zones not Functioning

Hey guys and gals,

I’m having trouble with some trigger zones in Unity. I’m using the Google Spatial Audio plugins in FMOD and want to change the occlusion parameter to make an ambience track go mostly quiet when the player is inside. I was doing this with the volume paramter and then decided to do it exclusively with the occlusion parameter. Funny thing is, when I then deleted the unnecessary volume parameter, everything stopped working. When I added the volume paramater back in, it worked, but on some of the ambience emitters (quad ambience) occlusion and volume are mislabeled so I had to use trial and error to find out which ones were mixed up. Once I had everything right, even though it was so messed up, I went on to something else and then the parameters started going screwy and flipping labels again so that two of the volume parameters became occlusion and vice versa.

I’m not quite sure what the issue is but it’s quite messed up.

What exactly do you mean by “everything stopped working”?
Can you possibly share some picture of your event and the parameters.

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Well we seem to have been having a lot of issues since the Unity 2017 update but this one involves parameters showing up in Unity in the wrong order, meaning sometimes the name doesn’t match the parameter being changed. We have four audio emitters and two parameters each (all identical in FMOD as they were edited in a group). On two of the emitters the names of the parameters are wrong, which was ok once I figured out that they were backwards. However, at some point after I restructured my scene to account for the error, the parameters on the two emitters that were labeled incorrectly switched back to being correct, while on the other two emitters they switched to being incorrect. I’ve tried deleting and recreating them, renaming them, and editing different parameters, but the same problem always pops up as soon as I try to load more than one parameter into Unity. I’m not at the office so I can’t grab any photos right now but I hope that describes the issue.

The parameters won’t necessarily be in the same order as they are in Studio as they are stored and sorted by GUID. The values should still be correct though.

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Trigger Zone Check
Imgur

So I went back and double-checked. The problem remains as described and can be seen in the screenshot. I copy/pasted the footsteps event and made two trigger zones to test it. As you can see in the screenshot, Footsteps2 has the same parameters but they are in the wrong order. Upon playing the project, it is the order and not the naming that corresponds to the proper sounds. I didn’t test it multiple times but I expect that the same issue as before would have popped up eventually. Namely, that the naming/order problem eventually would flip flop in a future build, leaving me with no way to trust that the parameter changes would stay the same after editing.

Not sure what I’m doing wrong with posting the screenshot. Here is a link:

Imgur

Even though the events are similar and the parameters are named the same and behave the same, they are all separate from each other and need to be thought of entirely independent from each other.

As I mentioned previously, Studio stores and sorts by GUID and not name or path. This option was chosen because it offers better protection when merging/integrating with multiple team members. “NOTE: The order of parameters is not necessarily the same as what is shown in the FMOD Studio event window.”

The Unity integration then accesses the list of events in the same order they are saved/built with in the banks.
The best way to access specific parameters is by name, using getParameter() or getParameterValue().

Is this causing any issues for you or would you just prefer it to look the same in editor?

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As I mentioned, none of this would be an issue except for the fact that at some point new builds of the FMOD project swap the parameter information around. I can’t keep constantly revisiting the parameters when new builds are flipping them back and forth. I will check again and see if this issue stops but I’ve had it on several occasions when events have more than one parameter.

There are efforts made in FMOD to stop this from happening. If you have a project that reproduces this, can you please send it (or a link to it) to support@fmod.com for further testing.