Table of Contents
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Summary
In the Advanced Settings tab of each Audio Object, you’ll find a series of optimization settings. Each Audio Object can have its own unique settings for their given context. However, you can also define settings in your topmost containers that’ll be inherited by all Audio Object children, unless they’re set to override. Let’s set the topmost Actor Mixer to use Virtual Voice.
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From the Layouts menu, select Designer.
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In the Project Explorer, go to Default Work Unit and select the World Actor-Mixer.
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In the Property Editor navigate to the Advanced Settings tab.
As mentioned in Project Limits and Behaviors, when a voice is managed by the Virtual Voice Behaviors, it refers to the Virtual Voice group box in this tab.
Here you’ll have four options:
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Continue to play: The voice will stay physical, despite being below the project volume threshold. This is useful for music or generally sounds that should under no circumstances be stopped.
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Kill: Stops the voice object. With short one-shot sounds, such as footsteps for example, this option is often the best choice as there would be no reason to send a sound to virtual voice that ends before it returns to physical.
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Send to virtual voice: Moves the voice to the virtual voice list. As described in the physical voice processing steps, virtual voices only compute volumes and bypass the more costly processes of file conversion, resampling and effect processing.
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Kill if finite else virtual: Kills the voice if not looping infinitely, else it will send it to virtual voice with Play from elapsed time option selected. This option is good for most of the Audio Objects in the project.
Currently the World Actor-Mixer is set to Continue to Play, which means that all Audio Objects in your scene will stay physical even when exceeding the Max Voice Instance limit or Volume Threshold. Most objects in the World (Non-Interface and Music) will at some point not need to stay physical. As such, you can save a significant amount of processing power by sending voices to virtual.
You have two Virtual Voice options. The 'Send to virtual voice' option will simply send all sounds to virtual voice when it can. With sounds like EvilCrawler_Move, this option would be a waste of resources, as it would usually be over before returning to physical voice. However, the 'Kill if finite else virtual' option would kill the EvilCrawler_Move Voice without harming any looping sounds. Let’s set the World Actor-Mixer, so that it sends to virtual voice if not overridden.
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Select the Virtual Voice Behavior dropdown menu and select Kill if finite else virtual.
Notice that the On return to physical voice option is not selectable. You can’t use Play from elapsed time with the Kill if finite else virtual option because the voices sent to virtual voice would be looping.