Reducing sound pileups

So you've got a giant pile of smashables for. Well. Let's be honest this is probably a bad idea. And yet, this scene exists in a ton of games.

Because we look at it and go, oh geeze that's gonna be so cool to smash. It'll be ok. Let me have this. The player demands it.

And the instinct isn't wrong! This is gonna feel so good! Except,

The NOISE this just made. Oh god. You can hear it, right? All of them smash together, so the sounds stack perfectly, and what screams from your speaker isn't so much a stacked set of crumbles as a BOOM? You're probably panicking, thinking of making a more advanced hitbox that traces along with animation movement precisely, so that all the boxes don't smash at the same time, surely a more realistic attack swing is the right solve here, and—Just back it up though, woah, reign in that horse. Instead,

Unreal's got your back here. Behold:

The bit you care most about is that random time being fed into a Trigger delay. It does exactly what you expect: this is how we can make sounds that we fire and forget, but that don't immediately make sound. Do this on your smashables, and while it won't exactly fix the problem, it will convert a BOOM into a sound at least approaching what you had in mind when you set up this, again let's be honest ill-advised but very cool, scenario.

Now this won't fix everything. For that, let's continue to peek at things, and look over here at

Concurrency and Attenutation

There's a bunch of ways of handling these. Generally, you want to make separate Sound Concurrency and Sound Attention assets, and reuse them. Think less about specific sound settings, and more about how you want Loud Sounds to handle, or Smashables, or you know, think more in type or genre or context, and make reusable chunks.

You don't have to though, hit that Override toggle and you can set them on a per-asset basis. Regardless, it's entirely possible these are things you've maybe never even looked at before—but they're the cure to so many woes.

In this case, Concurrency is how we can solve the other half of the BOOM.

MaxCount. It defaults absurdly high. Just set it to something reasonable like, 3, or 6, and problem gone. Want it slightly more elegant? Play with Volume scale, so that it blends the volume down as more and more begin stacking. You can go incredibly deep on these, but the point is, between this and the delay trick, you've solved the problem.

This Fixes Footsteps Too

While we're here, you know how enemy footsteps in prototypes (or a lot of indie games) tend to be the most annoying things on the face of the earth? How they're always too loud or too soft, stack too much, feel like they're hammering a hole through your ear, etc? Concurrency and Attenuation settings are the secret to fixing that. A lot of folks just, don't, and try to fix the problem by making the sounds quiet or less annoying, but naw. Pop in here and fix 'em the right way.

Usually the solve is: Aggressively crank Volume Scale, a reasonable Max Count, and apply a more aggressive (and non-linear) distance attenuation on them than you do anything else. At which point you'll go "but now I can't hear player footsteps!", and the answer there is one of two tricks:

1.) Play player footsteps as 2D sounds instead of 3D. Seriously. Yeah I know I know, but, it takes a bunch of more complex considerations and flattens (haw) them out to almost nothing. If you just want it to work, go this route.

2.) When you play sounds, you can also provide overriding attenuation settings. So set up custom PlayerFootstep attenuation/concurrency settings, and supply those as overrides when you play the footsteps, and there ya go, player's footsteps clop clop loudly while the NPC footsteps lightly pittypitty quietly.

Fin

Anyways, just hit this so wanted to do a quick lil post on it. Enjoy! Ciao!

(yeah I know this wasn't in my poll of what to do next—I had a moment of inspiration, the others are still the ones I was PLANNING to do this just, fell out of me when I wandered by this tab in my browser, oh no)