Steam Audio

So it turns out that Valve have released a new (Unity compatible) audio library. It looks to be pretty swanky, including physics based sound propagation, something I've wanted in stock Unity for a while now. While the new audio features in Unity are pretty great, it looks like this fills a niche that more than a few people here need filled, I'd wager. I'm in the process of using a demo project to get a feel for it, but so far it's pretty great. Valve has some demos up if you want to give a listen here.

 

What kind of license does it use? I couldn't find the info anywhere.

For outdoor scenes, would it be able to use pre-made convolution reverb that has been sampled in real locations?

 

So after playing around with it some more, I have some thoughts:

1. This is the best audio library I've used in a looong time. It's easy to use, but...
2. It's a little finicky. For instance, you have to pre-export your audio scenes, which isn't super obvious if you jump right in without reading the docks.
3. There seem to be some issues if you teleport your audio listener around, usually a slight buzzing or popping noise. I don't get the same buzz or pop under normal movement scenarios though.
4. So far I haven't found out how to get enemy AI to listen in, if it's at all possible. Maybe there's a way, but I haven't found it yet.
5. Other than those minor issues, this is great though. Like, it's nearly drag and drop (aside from tag fiddling and initial setup) to improve the overall quality of your scene. At least, it is for me, but I do all my work with headphones on, so I have no idea if it sounds different with speakers.

Yeah, the licensing is pretty buried. You have to go here and try to download the source code. It doesn't actually give you the source, just a readme and a license file though.

I can't say for certain. I know it has support for unity terrain as one of its meshes, but I've only tested an indoor scene so far.

 

That's pretty exciting!

The second demo on the page is pretty neat, in particular.

 

Yeah, I've been playing around with the baking as opposed to the realtime stuff for this and it's all pretty keen. One thing I've noticed, however, is that baking can get pretty slow pretty fast depending on how many probes you have set up.

 

Looking forward to test this out over the weekend, wonder if it's only for indoor audio.

 

Cool stuff! Looks very promising

 

Is there any word on IOS support, bit of a blocker if it is only Android for mobile devices.

 

Probably a low priority or not a priority at all. Valve recently bought the company behind the audio system (Impulsonic) mainly to "boost" VR stuff and Apple has not shown much interest in VR yet. The official announcement however mentions growing list of additional platforms.

http://steamcommunity.com/games/596420/announcements/detail/521693426582988261

 

I'm not sure I'd attempt using this on a mobile device in the first place. It's a bit CPU heavy.

 

That demo is sick.

The next round of horror games will sound way better.

 

This should help VR sickness a bit as well. I found in the past when using VR the audio was a big problem for me, since it wasn't properly changing as i turned by head or moved around the virtual world. Which would causes situations where your eyes were telling your brain one things, while your ears were saying you are static.

 

I'm sure I started a thread ages ago along the lines of "wouldn't it be nice if there was physics based audio..."

Well now there is! Maybe Steam read my post!

You're welcome.

 

I did some tests and I can say that it looks very promising. There are many options to set realistic physics of sound and the possibility of realtime or baked sound and wise use of lightprobes and the materials for distribution of sound.

 

So does it do echoes and stuff if you're in a cave? What about when you're underwater?

 

for a cave it would, providing physical materials are defined properly, but there is no standard way to define what is water in most game engines. So for underwater, i would use a trigger box, and low pass the S*** out of the audio and distort it.

 

I think we can prepare for games where you go though lots of pipes and valleys... and there will inexplicably be lots of bells lying around and pianos.

 

Hm, it is possible to achieve, but with good selection of materials and filters. By the way, there is a possibility, as far as I've seen, creating custom filters for materials.

 

Hey, here is a small video to get started

 

Hopefully some "best practices" tutorials come out soon to get it to sound as good as this:

 

Wow, the reverb effect in that demo was completely over the top.
I like the implementation of the directional audio compressor,
and I like where this is going tech wise.

BUT, I really hope that reverb doesn't become a trendwhore thing in games, where we have to go through 5 years+ of bathroom reverb, just to inevitably figure out that subtle is the key. Like we had to with lenseflare, bloom, chromatic aberration etc.

 

Don't think my ears would be able to take that. Most sounds in games are already over compressed to begin with

 

Anyone got it working with master audio (dynamic soundgroup) and/or InAudio (random audio node) ?

 

I tested with master audio and it seemed fine with the realtime, not sure what can be bake with the way master audio work.

 

I realy like where this is going

 

Hi, please contact me here PM or email me: support@darktonic.com. I'm the Master Audio author and initially I thought this was for Steam games only...but we may want to do integration with this since there's a lot of interest. Would love to hear what you had to do for "integration" and how to work with Steam audio in particular. Also curious about your "not sure" comment so would appreciate more detail.

By the way, I just added support for the Oculus Spatializer to Master Audio. Not released yet, but next version will have it!