Event and voice cooldown feature request

Question

Current voice limiting options in Wwise are incomplete without adjustable voice cooldown (ie. don't play a new sound of this type unless a certain amount of time has passed.) Voice cooldown is a very handy feature for managing voices, and a default for most other audio middleware.

Furthermore, cooldown for events can be very efficient at managing events that are prone to be posted in quick succession (ie. cull this event if the same event was handled within the given cooldown time), and provides a flexible way for managing sound clutter.

Currently, to implement any type of cooldown, one has to use complex hacks that clutter the actor-mixer hierarchy, or impement a custom solution on the code side. Most other competitors have some type of built-in cooldown feature. Wwise should catch up on this area.

Comments

I agree, I find it really strange that features like Delay and Probability are available at the Event level, but not something as basic as a cooldown

---

I agree 100 %. A playback cooldown function is something that's dearly missed!

---

Yes, please Audiokinetic, make this for us... There are workarounds for single voices by voice limitation and silence etc, but for interactive music with transition points and several voices playing at the same time it just doesn't work out most of the time. Currently I have to ask programmers to deal with this.

---

Same here, it is so needed.
I use a workaround with sequence and silence when possible but if I need to playback limit at an higher level, this tricks doesn't work.

---

Yes, would be very handy! I use it all the time when working with FMOD

---

200 times yes

---

Agree 100%. This would be very useful.

---

commenting with "skip delay" to improve SEO because that's what I would call this

---

Yes, I could really use this

---

Agreed. This is a common need, especially for chatter systems. This would have saved significant developer time for us.

---

We are getting close to 2024 and we still need this!

---

HUGE +1!!!! We need this please!

---

+1 Please add this, would very useful!!

---

that wold be grand, I have been looking for this and now just realized there is no such feature :(

---

Massive +1!!

The sequencer/silence method is taking the length of the SFX into consideration. Where as a traditional cooldown is more about how frequently a sound/event can be posted. For example, only allow this sound to be posted every 0.2 seconds, but the sound itself is 1 second long. It also causes complications where there's a group of different sounds/events where you want to tune how frequently they can be posted.

Ideally, there is a cooldown that can be modulated by an RTPC.

I understand the reasoning that this is better handled at the root/code level, and sometimes that is true. However that's not always desirable. For one..., that means needing dev support to tune the audio where as the sound designer or technical implementer may want to adjust these values based on other factors.

---

Another massive +1.

With all due and honest respect to Audiokinetic team, and while I do understand that implementing that in Wwise might not be easy at all, I would have to add that --

> So the best way to fix this, is to go back into the code and somehow set up a mechanism

-- this is game development world. We, sound people, are never getting the best way, we are getting the "good enough" way. It's easy to fix things from the game code when you're in control of it, yes. But on big productions, you never are in control of the code, and the programmers who are, _always_ (not an exaggeration) have higher priority tasks than implementing non-critical sound features (this one would be, and often is, considered non-critical). In 26 years of my career I've worked for a lot of game companies from different countries, and it almost never was the other way.

That means that, since most of us are effectively not getting the best way possible (and, in general, never will), the _real_ best possible solution is to have certain features baked into the sound engine itself -- like voice cooldown. After all, Wwise already has very useful voice limiting features (that, in turn, also could be handled by the game code, but they were implemented). This seems like a logical addition to that system.

Again, I am not saying that this feature would be easy to implement, and I'm absolutely not saying that Audiokinetic team might not have much more important and critical things to add. I just want to clarify why is this feature so wanted by Wwise users, and also to spill some light on possibly underlooked moments.

Answer 1

Hello Everyone, 

Thanks for letting us know you'd like such a feature!

It's true that we don't specifically have such a feature, but try this instead. 

1. Make a new Sequence Container.
2. Set it to Playmode > Continuous. 
3. Add SFX + SIlence to it (also the Sequence Container's Playlist)
4. In Advanced Settings, set the playback limit to 1 and "Discard newest instance".

This way, the duration of the silence will be the cooldown duration, and you can even control this from an RTPC. 

That's one way to do it, but there's usually an even better solution to this problem.

Voice cooldowns are usually the result of some game code not being properly "optimized" for audio calls. So the best way to fix this, is to go back into the code and somehow set up a mechanism that only calls the sound once. Maybe even use the Callback on AK_EndOfEvent, so once the sound is done playing, it will again be allowed to post the Event. This will minimize your sound engine calls, cause you fix it at the root of the problem.