what? unless things are just designed badly, there should only be one playing per source, on each end locally. again, most games have priority systems (better than unity’s native one which ignores distance) that handle all of this stuff and cull stuff that is either stacking the same sound or low audibility if other stuff is playing. avatars are just objects slapped into the scene that is the world with networked player updates - an audio source on an avatar should be the same as in a world unless otherwise specified.
Huh? the billion dollar industry does all the hard work, and everyone else gets the fruits of their labour for essentially free because they can study it. A lot of things aren’t as difficult to actually build as they are made out to be, just maybe difficult to process or manage. For instance a modular prop system for vrchat wouldn’t need to be vastly different from existing systems, just adapted - a hybrid between avatars and worlds for loadable udon objects, or they could have made udon entirely modular and behave more like ECS in how you use it in scenes in tandem with native functions, and would have made it vastly more flexible and future-proofed. VRChat has well over a hundred employees (and surely many more commissions/unofficial), that’s bigger than Bungie was, and they turned over the planet. Valve (having famously low employee count) has also innovated things that are used industry-wide as well, back in their days of working on Half Life 2 even. That’s not an excuse.
This would be helpful for some instances, but not necessarily transformative. Turning off one audio source and then turning on another after should be more or less the same cost aside from the small overhead of toggling gameobjects. Unless they let us use AudioSource.PlayOneShot and we could play one shot then change the audio to another and play one shot again. My understanding is that playoneshot is more optimized for instantiated audio sources, but can still overflow? Hard to find detailed information on the topic.
I’m not a coder and never will be, my skills are in studying and understanding design. I’m not useful if my input is not considered valuable. Plus design input is arbitrary, not something that works well for payroll unless you are a manager or director.
Sorry, i wasn’t intending to give that impression, i was spit-balling examples of where things are going and that people need to consider following in it’s wake. People on the edge of the curve should have been anticipating or even racing for realizing similar concepts anyway. I’ve seen indepth discussions for metaverse innovations in vrchat, but response is usually that it’s outside of vrchat’s scope, even though they could have capitalized on it with huge investment potential, even if their attempts at it were crude.
ps: unreal’s metaverse plans are only in early stages anyway, but they’re building proof of concept for their desired scale by engineering a new coding language.
“Because immersion” is excuses they’ve given for things in the past though lol. Immersion is extremely important for VR because it’s VR’s biggest selling point, so no that is a very valid and strong argument. Audio is the second most important aspect after visual for immersion in a media, there is reason why millions are spent on movie and game audio engineering. This is also why VRChat has been trying to get Steam Audio, because the oculus spatialization system they use now it kinda bad.
Continuing the discussion from Developer Update - 16 March 2023:
To address this, i actually did give examples this time (i was too slow to reply before and missed the thread closure)… I mentioned props, transformations, and foley (foley is like clothes ruffles and other nameless sounds).
Personally my issue is mostly in props and weapons, i want to make weapons that i can dynamically fight with my friends using, or funny props with jokes, and be able to use reactive particles (particle collision triggered) and have dynamic sounds. I want to be able to build prebaked environmental sounds for things that are supposed to be louder - in the example of a gun, you have a lot of sounds to consider: the handling, the magazine loading, slide, muzzle blast, cycling, environmental reverb, bullet cracks, and the biggest one: impact sounds. The only way to have a sound happen on a surface you aim something at currently is FinalIK (or some cursed stop-action world constraint nonsense). I don’t expect craploads of people to be making guns and stuff, but they are far from rare, as there are huge communities, especially RP ones, that make wide use of firearms on avatars. The difficulty with using anecdotal cases, is that it’s easy to just be like “well we don’t do that or don’t think it’s necessary” and ignore it’s relevance. The thing that is more important than current demand, is what opening doors to opportunity can create in the future, it’s all the ideas that we haven’t thought of yet.
The argument “just go to a world that has guns then” is a bad one, because a) there are hardly much options for polished well designed worlds that have these conveniently (and it limits individual expression to that of the world creator), and b) there is an absurd barrier of entry for designing worlds now that they are removing SDK2, as SDK3 is NOT newbie friendly (even with CyanTrigger), and is very deterring for people with limited mental power, limited attention span, and limited TIME. But i’ve made countless rounded logical arguments to why this is a problem, and all of them just get brushed off with “just git gud, go learn udon” (which is a terrible counterargument obviously).
※ I bring up UE5 mostly because of how resolute they are in making the design process easier, faster, and more newbie-friendly while also being very versatile, and how important that is, especially when observing the growth of AI systems, democratizing content creation to people who otherwise are hindered from doing so. VRChat seems to be doing the opposite, making it harder. It’s important that VRChat creators can make more cool things, because these benefit interest in the platform, and therefore it’s market value.