Just a simple implementation question about setting up this kind of behaviour.
If I have a scatterer sound with say 4 or 5 different stereo ambience tracks in the playlist of the module,
How can I then have Fmod seamlessly or naturally fade between these tracks? The Intervals is set up in such a way that the scatterer module is told to trigger a new sound ever 35 - 60 seconds, and I’ve set the polyphony on the deck module to 1, but it sometimes plays 2 stereo tracks at a time still?
Also it doesn’t sound exactly natural when one cuts off and the next is called in from the playlist.
Scatterer sound modules are not designed to support seamless fading between playlist entries, but FMOD Studio has other ways to achieve that. However, to know which method is best for you, I need to know the precise behavior you’re trying to achieve. Are the individual playlist entries all of the same length, or do they vary? Do you want the crossfade to the next track to always begin the same length of time before the end of the previous track? Is this for music, or a sound effect?
Also, the scatterer sound module definitely shouldn’t be playing multiple playlist entries while its polyphony is set to 1. I’ll investigate this issue. What version of FMOD Studio are you using?
This is for stereo ambience tracks - birds, things like that.
I’m trying to have a full length ambience play and then finish, and I wanted to use the scatterer sound functionality of waiting between 30 to 60 seconds before triggering the next ambience file (the point with this is that with the scatterer parameters you’re able to define that this range between an audio file stopping and the next one playing is a random time range).
Ideally, it would be nice to have it set up in such a way that it would crossfade between tracks, when the scatterer parameter is triggered (that is when it doesn’t wait for a whole track to finish, before randomly cuing up the next one in the playlist).
The ambience tracks all do vary in length and time though.
There’s a common misconception that the ‘Interval between sounds’ properties of a scatterer sound module define the period of time between the end of one playlist entry and the start of the next. In fact, the ‘Interval between sounds’ properties define the period of time between the start of one playlist entry and the start of the next.
If you want to guarantee a period of silence between one playlist entry ending and the next starting, you should set the minimum interval between sounds to a value greater than the length of the longest asset in the playlist.
Incidentally, note that sound files placed directly in a scatterer sound module’s playlist are automatically given 3D Panner effects with a max distance of 20 units. If this max distance is not appropriate for your game, you can instead add a single event sound module to the playlist, and place the audio files in the playlist of a multi sound module inside the referenced or nested event. (Event sound modules in a scatterer sound module’s playlist are not automatically given a 3D Panner effect, though you may add one to the nested event’s master track and customise its properties if you wish.)
