Stubbing out FMOD for UE4 dedicated servers?

I’d like to know the best way to go about stubbing out FMOD such that a bare minimum of logic is executed (for headless clients and dedicated servers.)

The current depth of our decision to play or not play sound within a blueprint is to switch off of IsDedicatedServer. We’d like to go a bit further and potentially modify the plugin to do even less. The holy grail of this would be compiling it out entirely for dedicated servers, but the way we’re using the plugin with blueprint creates a bit of a barrier here as any blueprint using audio would then also fail to compile.

At present we’re seeing a lot of event load failures (server does not need to load banks) for events that are added as FMODEvent Components. This isn’t much of an issue for objects that may or may not create events by name depending on if it is server or client.

Wondering if this issue has been addressed or tackled before and what the best course of option might be.

The first thing that comes to mind is to use FMOD_OUTPUTTYPE_NOSOUND for the output, FMOD will still perform all the scheduling and mixing but produce no output.

You could probably get rid of all the listener updating on the server, as the listeners will be updated on the clients side, which is a rather large chunk of the FMODStudioModule.