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Post by ricksaada on Oct 8, 2021 19:28:12 GMT
Here's what I'm trying to accomplish:
I have an effects sequence which is a mixture of particle effects, animations, sounds, or whatever. My manager figures out how long each thing is, when it's supposed to start relative to the previous things, and fires them off as needed.
So if I have a variable length animation of a molotov cocktail flying through the air and I need to sync the sound of the *woosh*, *smash*, *foomp* to start a quarter second before the animation ends, I can do it.
To do this, I need to be able to know how long each effect is (including the sounds). So what I tried to so was:
psr = MasterAudio.PlaySound3DAtTransform(soundName, parent);
if (psr.SoundPlayed)
{
Debug.Log($"started sound {soundName} paused at {Time.time}");
psr.ActingVariation.Pause();
return effectDuration = MasterAudio.GetVariationLength(psr.ActingVariation.SoundGroupName, psr.ActingVariation.GameObjectName);
}
Then, when it came time for this sound to actually play in the sequence (after the pinning bottle is nearly done), I'd call
psr.ActingVariation.Unpause();
This seems like it ought to work, but I ran into several big snags. First, GetVariationLength doesn't actually work. Because you've got:
#if ADDRESSABLES_ENABLED
case AudioLocation.Addressable:
LogError("Variation '" + variationName + "' in Sound Group '" + sType +
"' length cannot be determined because it's an Addressable."); // can add support for this if needed. Not sure of the need.
return -1f;
#endif
So I faked up the length for now. But that wasn't enough. Calling Pause() surprisingly calls Stop() for addressables. And that means when you try and UnPause() it fails because you're not playing. It also results in your sound getting unloaded, because now you don't have any copies playing, and the addressables cleanup code tosses it. So clearly I'm doing all this wrong, since I seem to be working against the way it's designed to flow. What's the right way to:
1. Figure out the length of a sound variation if I'm using addressables?
2. Can I pause it after loading and then start it at the right time in the effects sequence? Or am I stuck with restarting a new copy at that time because I can't keep one paused and not stopped/unloaded? Do I have to record the variation I got and then restart that one to be sure I get something that's the same length?
Thanks for any insight you can provide as to how to accomplish this.
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Post by DarkTonic Dev on Oct 8, 2021 23:56:20 GMT
For the pause stopping the sound, that's the lazy-saver, which is the default. If you paused something and forgot to unpause it prior to destroying the Master Audio game object, it would be stuck in memory and you couldn't reclaim the audio memory. So the default behavior is to kill it when you pause. You can disable that by checking the checkbox under Advanced Settings / Audio Clip Settings / Keep Paused Resources. But you'll need to make doubly sure you unpause things before destroying the Scene and stuff like that or you will lose your audio memory from the paused sound.
If you want to get the length of a Variation that's an Addressable or Resource File and it's not currently playing, you can't. It would require loading it first.
If it's playing, you can access it with:
var psr = MasterAudio.PlaySound3DAtTransform(soundName, parent);
var myLength = psr.ActingVariation.VarAudio.clip.length; // I didn't account for pitch changing the length, but you can add it.
However I don't see anywhere where the GetVarationLength method is used.
I hope that helps!
-Brian
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Post by ricksaada on Oct 11, 2021 19:03:58 GMT
> However I don't see anywhere where the GetVarationLength method is used.
Well I tried that because that's what's documented on the API site. You might want to update that to say that it doesn't work for addressables.
The Keep Paused Resources flag helps. I can pause/restart now. But unfortunately with addressables there's also a coroutine to load the clip. This means that after returning from calling PlaySound3D*, psr.ActingVariation.VarAudio.clip is null, so I can't get the length until the coroutine finishes and calls SoundGroupVariation.FinishSetupToPlay some unknown amount of time later.
It feels like I'm going to have to make these resources "clip" instead of "addressable" if I'm going to want to get this sequencing model to work. Since Addressables are Async (which I'm guessing is why MasterAudio.GetVariationLength doesn't work), I'd need a way to preload the sounds so I could determine the lengths to do the sequencing. Or maybe a way to get notified when the sound has been loaded, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that. Hmmm. I suppose I could keep a precalculated dictionary of soundname->length around for sequencing and stick with addressables, I was just hoping for an easy answer.
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Post by DarkTonic Dev on Oct 11, 2021 19:36:20 GMT
I'll add comments to GetVariationLength to make it clear it doesn't work for non-clips.
Correct about the Coroutine for Resource Files and Addressables. Even when you get the result back, it may not have started yet. I could add an event to subscribe for when the resource is done being loaded, but it doesn't mean it's already playing, so it seems of limited usefulness. We always schedule plays of audio, and it could be delayed to play in 1 second (or any value), and there's no way to exactly get notified at that moment that it starts playing. However we could add an event for when the audio is loaded into the Audio Source, if that would be useful? You could use that hook to get the length by looking at the Audio Source itself instead of calling GetVariationLength.
Let me know.
-B
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Post by ricksaada on Oct 11, 2021 20:59:13 GMT
Hmmm. Well for the moment I've just built my own dictionary. I'll see if that's a pain to keep updated when I've got more audio that needs to be included in effects sequences. If it does I can put together something that auto-builds it from a set of labelled addressables.
Addressables sure changes how you do everything with all the async apis it introduces. We've had lots of other places where we've needed to restructure things to support textures or what have you coming in "eventually." But since *we're* doing the async load it's easier to handle. I could see your having a notification event that gets fired when the load completes. For a standard "play a sound as soon as it's loaded" model I'm not sure that's really useful, but there may be other situations where you want to preload a bank of sounds so you don't eat the async load delay when you want it to play. Having a PreLoad api and a way to be notified when it's done could be useful. Something to think about as Unity pushes people to use Addressables more.
Thanks for your help.
Rick
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Post by DarkTonic Dev on Oct 11, 2021 22:08:56 GMT
I mean people have been using the Resource files for years, and they're in the same boat (play a sound as soon as it's loaded) - just so you know, this is the first I've heard of it not being useful. But anyway, there may be ways around it.
You could play a sound looping at zero volume to "preload" it. Then play it immediately on the next call. This may or may not work with "kill oldest voice" option, since stopping it prior to playing the new one may unload it.
If you'd like a "soundReadyToPlay" event, that's pretty easy to add.
Basically, if we need an option to "preload X", then we'd need an option to disable automatic unloading of a sound when none of it are playing. Or the whole thing may fall apart. Let me know if you think we should add some things like that. Be aware that any improvements will be in the Master Audio 2022 Upgrade product that's upcoming however.
Let me know what you'd like.
Thanks,
-Brian
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