Hey guys,
I saw that there’s no Unity 5 mixer discussion being active? Feel free to pin Sir Moderator!
I have some feedback for you regarding the audio implementation in Unity. After working with it a couple of weeks there are a couple of things that become apparently lacking in the current implementation. Mostly visual feedback but also pure functionality. These are a couple concerns that i’m having:
Snapshot blending/transition
The snapshots are a great idea. Being able to fade in and out sound and effects, especially different ambience sounds, is something that i need daily when working on Vane. There is something that feels very overlooked here though, and that is the transition functions. What all the different transition types (linear, smoothstep etc) do at the moment is just stopping audio in different ways. I might have overlooked something and i would be very happy if someone has a solution that doesn’t include faking a crossfade by having a third mixed channel to “smooth out” the transition.
Here are two examples and a picture to illustrate my point:
Current smooth step transition between the same sound (color noise)
Another thing that would be very valuable to have would be some way to visualize what snapshot is currently playing. Just hilight it in the mixer window!
It would be very nice to be able to override the snapshot transition type in the trigger script.
When you hide a group in the mixer it would be great (and logical) if the children are also hidden. Just like the layer grouping in Photoshop, Ableton Live etc works.
Audio was much neglected in previous versions of Unity. Great job with the feedback. I have yet to use Unity 5 as I’m waiting for it to mature a bit more but hopefully the devs pay attention to your feedback @Shapefarm
Hello Unity. I did some mockup UI design for you to showcase how the snapshots could be improved. It’s vital that you see what you’re doing, especially when the scenes grow more complex and you might have several snapshots fading in and out.
There is also a bug (i don’t think this was by design) that when you click “Edit in Play Mode” all the snapshots reset to the “Start Snapshot”. What you would want it to do is to give you control over the snapshot you’re currently in. It’s extremely annoying to be kicked out from the snapshot and out of you “mixing zone”. That’s what the little red record button (and the blink and the progressbar) in the gif is for. Visual feedback should not be underestimated.
The “progress bar” should be representing the weight of that snapshot.
I haven’t played with the audio stuff too much yet, but from what I have tried with replicating my old music system, the stuff you mentioned like the transition fade and ability to copy/apply fade settings to multiple snapshots simultaneously were the two big things that first came to mind.
