As the game has 3 distinct areas, the ambiences for each need to be suitable and unique. The game also needs to have the ability to seamlessly switch between each zone in a natural way. If the sounds were to instantly switch between each other, it would sound jarring and unnatural so I needed to find a way to achieve this. I first thought of have the ambiences be inputted into the games as emitters that would have a spherical shape of attenuation. While this could have worked, the shape of my level meant that circular audio zones could not cover the entire map sufficiently. Next I decided to have the sounds be 2D emitters with no attenuation, meaning that they are always heard in stereo. I tried to use States in Wwise to switch the ambiences as the player walked through trigger boxes, which worked relatively well. This however did not full achieve the seamless switching as States can only be either on or off, no in betweens. Finally I decided to try blend containers in Wwise for this purpose. I could set a range of values and have place my sound files onto the graph in the order that they will appear in the level. As seen in the image above there are 3 blocks for the tomb, the cave and the forest respectively. When the areas overlap, they create crossfades which will turn down one at the same rate that the other turns up. I now needed to attach these values to my game so that the fades can be triggered by the player. For Unreal Engine to talk to Wwise and control the ambience, a game parameter must be created. In this case I created one with a maximum of 20,000, a minimum of 0 and a default of 18,945. These figures relate to the units within my game from the start of the level to the furthest away point. The above set of nodes are found within the Level Blueprint, which is the blueprint that houses the entire game world. From the Event Tick node it travels into the SetRTPCValue node. This is a Wwise specific node that will send game parameters and data into Wwise so that Game Parameters can be controlled. The green wire named Value is calculating the distance in 2 dimensions from the furthest point away in the tomb, to the player. This number is then sent into Wwise and changes the LevelProgression parameter. As you can now see from this blend container, the LevelProgression value will continually update as the player moves through the level. The crossfade points are at the boundaries of each ambience zone and soothly fade into each other in a realistic manner.
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Matt BurrowsDocumenting my final year at university studying sound design. Archives
April 2021
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