The biggest thing that is consistently missing from game audio is "ducking". This is the practice of dynamically compressing the gain of other sounds to "make room" for the sound(s) you want to hear. Ducking is how you can clearly play a sound over loud sounds without playing the new one even louder. It creates "perceived volume" while still maintaining your target gain levels. For example, your game music and other sound effects are pumping loud during a boss fight. The player fires a shotgun. Everything is maxed. So if you play the shotgun sound, even at max, it will sound quiet. This is standard practice in music production. The way to accomplish this is by applying compression to your other sounds which is keyed to the gain of the louder sound. So when the shotgun fires, the music volume "ducks" for that fraction of a second, proportional to the shotgun's volume.
A topic I was looking to get better at, great video, learnt a lot!
The biggest thing that is consistently missing from game audio is "ducking". This is the practice of dynamically compressing the gain of other sounds to "make room" for the sound(s) you want to hear.
Ducking is how you can clearly play a sound over loud sounds without playing the new one even louder. It creates "perceived volume" while still maintaining your target gain levels. For example, your game music and other sound effects are pumping loud during a boss fight. The player fires a shotgun. Everything is maxed. So if you play the shotgun sound, even at max, it will sound quiet.
This is standard practice in music production. The way to accomplish this is by applying compression to your other sounds which is keyed to the gain of the louder sound. So when the shotgun fires, the music volume "ducks" for that fraction of a second, proportional to the shotgun's volume.
Interesting trick. I've never had to implement this myself for a game. Will look into it next time. Thanks for the info.
underrated topic in video game development. Thank you for sharing your knowledge!
OH, the struggle of making a "simple" volume bar. Thx for sharing! I love godot but I got so annoyed when I had to do this exact thing.
14:47 You can also modulate pitch based on that sound origin's distance from the player to create a realistic doppler effect
10:48 godot has builtin functions to operate the lineardb conversion: linear_to_db and db_to_linear (respectively linear2db and db2linear in 3.x)
I wasn't aware of this one. Even better!
That was quite a good topic! Does your beard grows with your knowledge by the way?
It's supposed to grow with my kids, but maybe it's both?
Can you add chapters to your videos?
Done :).
@ epic, thank you!