I’m having a bit of trouble with my audio levels of 2D vs 3D sounds. See my screenshot for more helpful illustration.
[34870-audio+listener.jpg|34870]
I’ve a top down 2D game here with an Orthographic camera of size 10.
I have a selction of sounds for damage, gunshots, explosions, special moves, and music. The audio levels on these files are all of similar levels, and comparable to normal game sounds and music, so the clips are fine. No need to worry.
The player is the ship in the red circle and the camera follows him so that he’s always near the centre, so the red circle represents the player’s possible positions relative to the camera at any given time. The ships you see are about 1 unity unit in size.
My music files are 2D sound (naturally) and I want all SFX to be 3D. The problem is that as 3D sounds, I’m a lot further from them. The screen is about 20 units wide but I want to be able to hear everything on screen at roughly equal volumes, and even stuff that’s not on screen but is still relatively nearby (see the radar in top-left. The middle circle is roughly the screen but I want to be able to hear (more quietly) into the next circle too).
I’ve put the Audio Listener on the camera at a height of 10 units above the Z plane (all ships are on 0) to make it so the player isn’t WAY louder than everything else and right now the volumes of the 3D sfx satisfy me relative to each other, but overall (and compared to the music especially) they’re way too quiet because they’re far away.
My music is actually down to 2% volume just to I can hear the sfx over it, and I’ve doubled the game’s master volume (which starts to distort certain sound clips). Even still my game audio is very quiet.
Is tricking around with the logarithmic roll-offs on every single sound the only way to get what I want at normal volumes? Surely there’s a better way to be handling this. What I really want to be doing is increasing the ‘size’ of the audio listener, if you get me. Instead of it being one tiny point on this big screen, that it occupies most of the centre of the screen?
I would have thought increasing the size of the camera would have done this automatically…
What are the options, anyway?
Thanks guys.