# Unreal 4 Engine - Audio implementation (Game sound design)



## steinmann (Oct 21, 2015)

Hey guys, not sure where to post this thread. 

I know many of you are more film music oriented, but I decided to give this a shot.

I've been working with the Unreal 4 engine + FMOD + Wwise to implement my sound design in games. I'm quite new to this but I'm loving the experience.

I was wondering if anyone here has any experience with this kind of thing, so we can share some questions here and maybe find solutions to problems related to node structure in UE4 and stuff like that.

Cheers!


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## Rasmus Hartvig (Oct 21, 2015)

Interesting thread! I'll follow along here. I only implement audio in Unity, but Unreal is on the horizon at some point.

How do you find FMOD and Wwise? What do you like best?


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## steinmann (Oct 22, 2015)

Good! Another person interested in audio scripting. =)

FMOD is a lot more user friendly and pretty. It has similarities with Ableton and Logic and it is also up to date with most game engines and has full compatibility with Win and Mac. On top of that it has overall best learning resources online.

Wwise is a bit more tweakable and powerful, but it is less friendly and has a steeper learning curve. It runs on Mac in a wrapper for compatibility and currently you can't use it has a plugin on the Unreal Engine 4 if you're using Mac. It can only run in UE4 if you have a Win machine. I don't think one is better than the other, they are different so I think that the best is to learn both! =)

I never used Unity and I don't have a programmer background. I read that UE4 was the most powerful engine around (Along with the Cryengine which can only be used on Win machines, so that excluded that option for me) so I decided to start learning it. Also, the UE4 is FREE, which is a no brainer.

Right now I'm just learning it bit by bit and seeing the many ways of implementing the audio. I'm also building levels from scratch (No template) to familiarize myself with all the features. You have a big advantage because you already have Unity knowledge, which will help you a lot when transitioning to UE4.


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## Pasticcio (Oct 22, 2015)

I've worked with Fmod & Wwise abit but have never played with the Unreal Engine. Only Unity for me so far.


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## benatural (Oct 22, 2015)

I've shipped one or two games using Wwise and FMOD. I work at a game studio. No Unreal experience yet, but I've worked with plenty of other game engines.

Do you have any specific questions?


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## Jonathan Howe (Oct 22, 2015)

I am currently working on 2 Unreal projects, one using FMOD and one just using the built in audio engine + some scripting. If you have any specific questions I might be able to help.


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## steinmann (Nov 11, 2015)

Jonathan Howe said:


> I am currently working on 2 Unreal projects, one using FMOD and one just using the built in audio engine + some scripting. If you have any specific questions I might be able to help.



Jonathan, do you know how to play a sound based on a timeline in UE4? Imagine that you have a sliding door and it's position is driven by a timeline. I'm trying to associate a sound with the timeline because the animation is triggered with "On actor begin overlap" and with "On actor end overlap" nodes, which means that sometimes the door will only open until halfway because you entered and exited the trigger box to quickly. When that happens my sliding sound plays from start to finish, which is not ideal because the door didn't perform the full animation.

I want the sound to follow the movement of the door and it seems to me that the best way to do that is to have it follow the same timeline that the door is following. Any ideas?


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## Jonathan Howe (Nov 11, 2015)

Hey steinmann,

I also just saw your post on /r/gameaudio about it! What I would do is just stop and quickly fade out the event whenever the animation stops/you exit the trigger before the animation has fully played. That seems like the simplest solution to me unless something is preventing you from doing that.


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## steinmann (Nov 12, 2015)

Jonathan Howe said:


> Hey steinmann,
> 
> I also just saw your post on /r/gameaudio about it! What I would do is just stop and quickly fade out the event whenever the animation stops/you exit the trigger before the animation has fully played. That seems like the simplest solution to me unless something is preventing you from doing that.



Good to know you're also there!  I already fixed the problem by forcing the door to always fully open, even when I enter and exit the trigger box quickly. This way the sounds that I designed always play perfectly in sync with the movement of the doors. 

The doors are being animated in a blueprint where I store their location in a vector when "event begin play", then to that vector I add a new one that's driven over time in a timeline and that's what makes the doors move. (I add values in the X axis because that's the direction in which the doors move.)

I discovered that there's a function in UE4, under the FMOD category that allows you to scrub audio in a FMOD event. It's called "Set timeline position" and it has a pin that can receive info from a timeline (For example) and the result is that that timeline will drive the playhead position of a audio file inside an event in FMOD. This is what I originally wanted to do but I'm happy with what I have now. Thanks!


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## Jonathan Howe (Nov 15, 2015)

Glad you got it sorted out! The "Set timeline position" function sounds really cool, haven't used it before. Thanks for the update and best of luck with the project.


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