Fmod

The primary artifact I've been working on this week is to implement FMod studio support.
FMod studio is a sound design tool for games that quite recently added support to Unity. FMod studio is not to be confused with the FMod library which Unity already uses internaly to play sounds. The primary use of FMod studio in this project is that we can add variables to what FMod studio calls "Events" the sound designer then uses these variables to change the way the sound behaves. As a programmer I can then access these variables in Unity and change them in runtime to change the sound.

For instance, if we have a event called "Driving" this event has the variables:
Material - For the material of the ground
Velocity - For the speed of the object
Wind - The wind where the object is
Pitch - If we want to pitch the sound (for slomotion)

The Material variable then has some "triggerzones" when it has the value 0 it has a dirt sound, when it passes 0 to 1 it automatically crossfades between dirt and metal since that is what the sound designer has told the sounds to do in this triggerzone. and if we instead go from 0(dirt) directly to lets say 5 which  is stone it will corssfade from dirt to stone, skipping all the materials in-between.
When the Event then is exported it becomes one file that a programmer easily can access all the variables in, instead of having 500 different sound files and creating a system that fades between them when we want by ourselfs. It also means that the sound designer gets exact audio experience it's looking for, since it will sound exactly the same in the game as in their project.

Small Things

So just as the last week this week I've been doing alot of small scripts for the artist, Mikael our lead artist wanted to have some scripts that rotated things towards the camera and panned textures, pulsates lights, making objects move towards the player and so on. Not really that much to talk about those things, they are all basicly 1 row scripts and does exactly what their names suggests.

I also added an aura around the pickups to emphasize their pick-up range, and added the textures on the player.

I'll probably post some video footage later this week.

That's all for today, goodnight and thanks for reading.

-David Forssell