No occlusion with user-defined position source?

Question

I've been working on a project in UE4, and I made an event which randomly selects one of many aircraft flyby sounds. I used the user-defined positioning to play the sound in a random position as well. Spacialization is enabled. The event is played through an akAmbientSound actor placed in the sky in my level. I have noticed that with a user-defined position source, there is no occlusion. This means when the player goes inside, the flyby sounds are still heard. I am assuming the user-defined positioning forces UE4 to ignore the ambient sound actor position when ray tracing? With game-defined positioning the occlusion works, but then the sounds are not randomly placed in 3d space. Is there any way to get around this? The 3 things I can think of are 1) through scripting in UE4, randomly select a point in space (at random intervals) to trigger a one-shot flyby, 2) stop my event when the player goes indoors or 3) create a field of ambient sound actors.  The problem with 2 is it will be less realistic than the lowpass filter and attenuation offered through occlusion, and 3 seems somewhat improper to me. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can solve this?

Many thanks!

Answer 1

Hi Richard,

You're right that 3D User-Defined is not affected by occlusion. I've just checked with the Ambient Demo (Wwise UE4 integration demo you can find on GitHub) to validate that info.

Have you tought of using a simple event with a "Set LPF" action that is triggered when you go somewhere indoors? That event could target a  bus where your 3D user-defined sounds are routed to.

Hope this helps,

Simon

Comments

Merci Simon. C'est ca que je pensais- la solution doit être de changer le volume avec un filtre lorsque'on est à l'intérieur. C'est quand même assez simple!

Translation: Thanks Simon, that's pretty much what I thought. It should be simple enough to do!