I thought I’d start with something relatively simple and look at the machine gun sounds for the Player character’s attack. In FMOD an ‘Event’ is used as a reference to a specific sound event in a game. Each sound event will have it’s own Event within FMOD. In this instance I created my first Event and titled it ‘Player Gunshot’. Whenever the Player fires their weapon in the game this Event will be referenced.
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| A default Event with sound module in FMOD. |
My base gunshot sounds consist of pitch shifted shotgun
blasts and small gelignite explosions. I also blended the sound of a
staple gun being fired which gives it a metallic click and makes for a
more machine like character, which I think worked well. All these sounds
were just taken from various sound libraries. In-game the sound needs
to loop rapidly like a machine gun so I have created five short gunshot
files with very little tail to ensure smooth looping.
A default Event consists of an audio and master track on a timeline. Sounds within an event are referenced via what is called a sound module. At it’s simplest a sound module will play back a sound as the cursor crosses it on the timeline. Pretty much similiar to a region or clip in Pro Tools. But that’s just for starters, there are many ways in which a sound module can be utilised in FMOD.
In this event I will be using a multi-sound module. Where the standard sound module references a single sound file a multi-sound module is used to reference and manipulate multiple sound files. On the audio track within the Event I created a multi-sound module and placed my five gunshot files within it. The mutli-sound module allows me to control how these five sounds will play back including which of the files to play, whether to play them in order or at random, whether to loop them, how many times to trigger the sounds and more. We can also apply pitch and volume automation and randomisation.
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| A simple multi-sound module in FMOD. |
I’ll leave it there for now. These initial posts are a little longer than I expected due to explaining some of the FMOD concepts. But I think it’s worthwhile to give brief explanations so that this blog doesn’t end up purely consisting of impenetrable techno jargon with no worth to anybody. As a newcomer myself it’s helpful to recap and explore my own understanding so hopefully it will be helpful to others too.
