AudioBounce is an innovative and easy-to-use realtime audio occlusion and reflection system for Unity, designed to amplify the realism of in-game sounds.
Originally born for my own in development game needs where I had to solve the problem of populating a ton of environments with realistic and immersive audio in a multitude of procedurally generated levels.
Being a very complicated task for a solo dev using the standard Unity triggers and volumes system I took inspiration from AAA games techniques to solve this problem once and for all!
AudioBounce turns the time consuming (and costly) practice of setting up audio volumes, gates, triggers for each room or area to simulate occlusion and reverberation of your game to a simple ājust drag and drop the sound where you want itā and āadd the AB_SoundRegister component to itā and thatās it! AudioBounce will take care of everything else in real time while also adding much more needed features and realism to it automatically!
Hereās a list of the main features:
Natural Sound Bouncing: AudioBounce positions sounds to mimic how theyād naturally echo off walls and objects in a 3D way.
Dynamic Audio Adjustments: It tweaks sound properties like occlusion and reverberation based on the 3D layout around the player.
Automatic Handling: Say goodbye to manual setups. AudioBounce detects and adapts to moving objects and changing environments in real-time. And yes, by moving objects I mean entities like enemies as wellā¦ trust me, youāll thank me later for this.
Optimized Performance: Engineered for efficiency, AudioBounce spreads its computational load across frames and threads in a highly customizable variety of ways. At a speed of 0.3msā¼ with standard settings makes it possible to include this feature in games targeted for up to 240fps out of the box and can be configured to be faster and more precise at a higher cost if you want!
Beginner-Friendly: AudioBounce is ready to work with minimal setup and knowledge by design but also includes a lot of advanced capabilities. Every feature is well-documented and explained in depth with tooltips on the tool itself, welcoming both newcomers and audio pros.
In essence, AudioBounce takes care of the complex audio work at as little or as much performance cost you need, letting you focus on crafting your game!
The demo on the videos is going to be available to test as a stand alone as soon as i figure out how i can safely share it with you (suggestions are welcome )
Yep, Sonity is going to be supported right after launch, maybe even on the first patch. I havenāt started working on it yet cause iāve been busy with other jobs but it shouldnāt be too much troublesome.
I havenāt considered Master Audio or any other tool yet, iāll get in touch with the authors and see what i need for that (ā¦it might be compatible straight out of the box)
The price is going to be 79.95$ and we are launching at 30% off for the first two weeks so about 56$
Itās pending approval for the Unity Asset Store, another 2-3 weeks left (hopefully!).
I jst grabbed Sonity so donāt make an integration just for me - couldnāt pass it up on flash sale. I do love Master Audio though, but Iāll see what Sonity has, it does look pretty intertesting for sure.
We use Sonity on our in-development game as well and the devs actually helped me testing this tool so a Sonity compatibility is 100% coming up. I just wanted to gather some feedback from actual AudioBounce users first and see if thereās something i need to change in the core program before working on compatibility on other tools ^^
Iām more of a Tech-Artist rather than Audio Engineer so i wouldnāt even know how to write a reverb system at this moment. What iām doing is funneling the audio source in the scene through a preset number of audio mixer channels where i have reverb and occlusion pre applied and i change the values of those pre applied fx for each sound in the scene (up to 32) given the amount of occlusion aperture and reverberation you would hear for each of them.
In short itās a lot of math, trigonometry, raycasting and instancing (all under 0.4ms on standard settings) but iām using Unity standard sound system to alter the audio in output.
Thanks man! Yeah iāll promise you itāll blow your mind when experienced
We were at about 2000 in queue when iāve made this forum post and we are at about 650 now (holidays and all though). Iām guessing itās going to take another week or two, unless they find something for me to fix that escaped my many many months of hard work ^^
Yep!
Iāve made AudioBouncer especially for that since itās a feature of my own game as well. All you need to do is to add a component to your audio emitters and one for your listener, it is completely independent of geometry or positioning which means itās 100% compatible with generated levels, destructible environment, moving obstacles (like a door) or moving sounds (like an enemy walking through your level in search for the player).
I know itās hard to believe or even imagine how powerful AB is until you try it and realize itās safe to say less than 1% of games have this kind of tech and the ones who have are for sure paying a lot for it ^^
Iām going to release the demo you see in the videos the day the asset gets published (if it can pass Unityās scrutiny) so you all can test for yourself It could be as early as this week!
Unfortunately it seems like weāll have to wait till next week. At max the number usually goes down of 60 more or less, sometimes 20 or inbetween. Thereās a lot of people submitting lots of stuff (especially 3d models) to the asset store so it takes a while. I hope we donāt have to wait months for patches too ^^
Itās hard to say cause iām not familiar with the Dissonance plugin. Technically for any audio to be processed by AudioBounce it has to be a playing audio source in the scene with the AB_AudioSourceRegister component. Also if Dissonance is outputting itās own modulated audio somewhere in the audiomixer thatās also some reason of concern cause AudioBounce does the same thing with itās own elaborated audio to add reverb and occlusion.
In short it may be possible to make it compatible but it would require a substantial amount of work and depending on how Dissonance is using the audio mixer there might be some loss of functionality like volume, reverb and occlusion modulation but you would gain positioning. On the other hand you could bypass Dissonance audio effects and keep only the source to make the voice audio managed by AudioBounce for a very realistic effect.
The choice itās yours! If you decide to try and you need any help let me know
Just so you all know, iāve been working on implementing two new features before FMOD and Sonity compatibility:
High Priority Mode : Enabling this on an AudioSource will force AB to evaluate this sound even when itās not playing, making it ready. Itās meant for sounds that can be played at any time near the player and they need to be ready for when that happens. This was necessary due cause if a sound suddenly starts playing near the player AB will take at best two frames to evaluate itās position and parameters and this would make the sound play for a split second with itās original parameters before AB takes it over.
Reverb Only Mode: Enabling this on an AudioSource will (hopefully, itās very complicated) skip itās ray traced computation and evaluate this sound reverberation fx only. Some sounds might be āgamingā related and are not meant to be handled by AudioBounce with complex occlusion and reposition but they can still benefit from reverberation for enhanced player spatial awareness. One useful case that comes to mind would be having flat gun tails sound, raycast itās positioning somewhere in front of the player and you will hear it with procedurally modulated reverberation depending on the size of the room you are in thanks to AudioBounce, making you save a lot of time preparing gun tails sounds for every possible scenario and find a way to play the correct one like you would normally do without AB.
These are taking some time due to the incredibly complex and lightweight nature of AudioBounce and they are going to need a bit of testing once iām done. If you have any other suggestion that can be beneficial to common use case in sound engineering please let me know asap, these kind of features are better included before early!
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