FMOD is a sound effects engine that was specifically designed to help implement audio in video game projects, working very much like a digital audio workspace (DAW) as a way to mix and combine audio assets.
The most noticeable features of FMOD is its ability to use trigger, parameter, and looping region capabilities, which can be used in a multitude of ways.
For one of my game projects (Roast-It-Notes), I was approached to find a way to implement audio assets in a way which allowed certain tracks to stop and start, or to interrupt the current track playing, depending on the players actions.
"The solution that we came up with was to use the radio to shape the narrative of the game - most of the audio assets would be divided up into either important dialogue or filler dialogue. Important dialogue were conversations, news stories, or other pieces of speech that moved the plot of the game along... as well as giving them hints on the different ways they can interact with the objects in the space."
--> Roast-It-Notes development diary.
A way to make this idea a reality in our game would be to process the sounds through FMOD, using parameters and triggers. This is a production technique that I learnt from a mixture of my lecturers and online videos, such as the one from LookListen Sound Design (2015).
The first task is to seperate the tracks into our categories - important or filler. All filler dialogue was imported as a multi-instrument, and all important dialogue was imported as their own track.
Setting up the filler sounds as a multi-instrument allows the sounds to randomly rotate through as long as the player is not engaging in any important action. 'Important action' can be communicated in FMOD through the use of parameters.
In FMOD, parameters can be set so that certain triggers will be activated when they are within the parameter's ranges.
Script in a game engine such as Unity can be written so that when players are engaging in unimportant actions it translates to a FMOD parameter of 0. This parameter of 0 will allow the multi-instruments of filler sounds to play as long as this parameter remains, which is also made possible for the loop region that is placed over the instrument.
The first piece of important dialogue however, has been given a parameter setting of 10. This means that when a player engages in an important action, it can be embedded in the script for the parameter to be changed to this same number, triggering the first piece of important dialogue to play to coincide with the player's actions. For example, when the player picks up (or collides) with an Airbender action figure, the '10 parameter' will be triggered and a segment of dialogue discussing the best kind of bending will play over the radio. The transition region that you can see in green allows the important piece of dialogue to cut through and interrupt the current filler dialogue, making the change in tracks instantaneous. Without this region the player would need to wait until the end of the current clip to hear the important dialogue, even when the trigger has been changed, which would be inefficient in gameplay.
There should also be a destination marker, which acts as a code that resumes the filler dialogue multi-instrument. This stops the important dialogue from repeating itself, which is not necessarily needed in this project.
In Conclusion
This blog has covered just some of the uses of FMOD features, such as multi-instruments, parameters, loop and transition regions, and destination markers. The capability of these features can be used in many ways, and as such it is the most effective for a beginner to understand what these features can do on a fundamental level, so that they can be used creatively in a wide range of projects - this is what I have hopefully done here.
If you would like to watch a video that discusses this topic further, click here.
FMOD also has an extensive glossary with details on their features here, where you can look up the terms mentioned in this blog.
Works Cited
Firelight Technologies. (2018). Glossary. Retrieved Aug 13, 2018, from fmod.com: https://www.fmod.com/resources/documentation-studio?page=glossary.html
LookListen Sound Design. (2015, June 17). FMOD Studio Adaptive Music: Switching between loops with Transition Regions. YouTube.
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