Entry 27 - Balancing Sounds

Uhh.. There was no news for 2 months.

But don't worry. It doesn't mean I'm relaxed and do nothing. Conversely. All I do is work, so it's hard to find the strength even for the next post.

The main thing I've been doing all this time is playing my own game. Along the way, adjusting each parameter - the speed of each enemy, the cooldown of each skill, the volume of each branch crunching, and so on.

It was the volume of the branch crunching that caught my attention the most at the very beginning of my walkthrough - I noticed the lack of sound volume balance. There are thousands of different sounds in the game - hits, crunches, steps, animals, magic, weather, inventory etc. All of them were recorded separately and their volume is random. Therefore, some sounds scream very loudly, creating an unpleasant sensation in the ears, and some are barely audible. The fix is simple - you just need to set each sound to the correct volume. Each... Of several thousands... By the way, it's impossible to consider each sound separately - it must be combined with several other sounds in order to srt up the volume of these sounds relative to each other.

In Unity it's not easy to balance sounds' volume. To change each source's volume you need to pause the game, change the volume value, and then continue the game. Sometimes it is not so easy to detect which certain sound is out of the mix. As a result, setting up each sound takes several minutes. If you estimate roughly the total required time for this, you'll get 5 minutes * 2000 sounds = 10000 minutes = 166 hours = 20 days of 8 hours (if you work without interruptions). Not very good prospect...

To make it easier for myself, I decided to spend a few days and make a mixer panel, which will allow me to adjust each sound directly during the game, without stopping it. 

In the end, that's what I've got:

The panel locates ALL the sounds available in the game. I can assign a horkey to any of the sounds, play these sounds quickly and easily in any combination, smoothly change the volume of individual sounds, thus quickly and easily determine the volume of each sound. It is also possible to play some sounds automatically to create some abstract background from them and be able to fully focus on one sound.

At first I thought creating of this panel would take me 2 days, but it took 5. But this time was not wasted. Thanks to the mixer, balancing sounds turned out to be a simple task, which I completed in just 2 days. 

So out of the blue, I lost one more week of time.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all! Stay healthy and let the new year be positive!