Ambient Sounds

Welcome to the Ambient Sounds Unity Forum!

Ambient Sounds creates interactive soundscapes for Unity.

You can configure areas in your game to play back music and sounds to create an unique atmosphere for each region in your game. The playback system follows rules and requirements and allows your sounds to react to changes in gameplay.

The sounds and music you use in your project are organized into Sequences and Ambient Sounds shows you an overview over your games audio with a management window that also shows debug information in real time.

Stop fiddling with dozens of individual audio scripts in your scene and take back control with Ambient Sounds!

Ambient Sounds allows you to:

• Organize your audio clips into Sequences with combined playback settings
• Playback these Sequences either globally (“everywhere”) or locally in a certain area of your game world
• Pair multiple Sequences of background noises and music to create an unique soundscape for each location in your game
• Blend seamlessly between these soundscapes in different regions
• Make these Sequences interactive by controlling them through Requirements
• Modify these Sequences on the fly to react to Events in your game
• Synchronize Playback between Sequences to make them start and end at the same time even if they are different in duration.
• Keep control over your Ambient Audio setup with comprehensive lists of all Sequences and conditions in your scene in the Ambient Sounds Manager Window.

Optimal workflow, minimal coding:

Ambient Sounds organizes Sounds that belong together in a Sequence. Sequences are reusable and can be played back in Audio Areas that are distinctive regions in your game. You can create Modifiers to adjust playback parameters of Sequences in real time. The code required to integrate Ambient Sounds with your gameplay is minimal – you can call simple one-line functions anywhere from your scripts to update Ambient Sounds with Events and Values from your game.

Example use cases:

• Create a forest soundscape that plays back different music and sounds (birds, frogs, branches breaking, wind rustling) depending on time of day and / or weather
• Play back sounds coming from random places around the player or a certain location
• Play more and more intense wind as the player scales up a mountain
• Change the music to a combat theme as the player gets attacked
• Slowly blend to a dark and moody soundtrack while the player enters a cave
• Make a sequence more and more intense by adding additional sequences that play back more music / sounds
• Play back music faster as the game enters the final seconds before the time limit ends
• Automatically duck / mute music playback while dialogue audio plays
• Stop music playback as the player enters a building and resume as they leave again
• Play sounds around the player that follow with the player’s movement as they weave a magical spell
• Quickly re-use the Ambient Audio Areas in different places of your game or in other projects.

Click here to read the full Ambient Sounds Documentation.

Click here to check out Ambient Sounds on the asset store!

 

Quick Start Guide:

Tutorial:

Demo Scene Video

 

This looks to be quite interesting. Any chance of some video tutorials please?

 

Yep we plan to make them. I am travelling in Europe for a couple of weeks and did not have time to create before I left. We will make when I get back.

 

I'll be keeping an eye on this one. This is another piece I have been missing to my games as well

 

Cool. I picked it up anyway as I know it'll be good from you guys.

 

It comes with a demo scene that demonstrates most of the features, so you can see how everything is set up there, also there is a complete PDF manual included. If you still got questions please post here or you can also join our discord server, I should be able to help you out quickly with questions.

 

We released an update for Ambient Sounds today (Version 1.1.0).

New Features:

* Easier Sequence Creation:
Audio Clips can now be dropped on Sequences list in the Manager Window to add the clips to a sequence
Dropping multiple Audio Clips on the "New Sequence" button will create a sequence containing these clips
Dropping multiple Audio Clips on the "New Sequence" button while holding CTRL will create multiple Sequences with one Audio Clip each

Fixes:

* Fixed a bug where preloaded Audio Data was not preloaded for some Audio Areas on startup
* Performance fixes for loading Audio Data, less memory allocation, Audio Data is loaded across multiple frames now
* Fixed an issue with changing clips in a sequence while a fade-out is still playing
* Fixed an issue with the Audio Prefabs in the demo scene when "Resonance Audio" was selected as spatializer plugin

 

We just added a video of the downloadable demo scene (see above). Tutorials will come later this week.

 

How much will it cost when release sale will end?

 

$47

 

@AdamGoodrich are the other Ambient assets launching this month as well?

 

Ambient Skies will, and hopefully Ambient AI as well - depends if stable enough.

 

With our other tools you can create beautiful environments really quickly.

The Ambient Suite will then allow you to bring them to life by adding audio, skies and ai.

All up - with a few hours work you should be able to create beautiful and rich living worlds!

 

Interesting. Can a read somewhere about it?

 

Sounds intereting.
Anyway I hope that you will support other Asset integrations as well.
For example does it come with Enviro Support to get Time, Seasons etc and define different sound sequences etc for it?
What about Quest Machine / Dialog System support for quests?

Cheers
Ronny

 

There is not much official Info out about it at the moment as it is still in development. In general Ambient AI will bring your scene alive with background animated beings. bipeds, quadrupeds, birds and fish, as well as a navigation system designed to work in procedurally generated environments

 

We will have to see what users are requesting for it in regards for integration. It currently has no integrations for other assets, but it has a very simple to use API to get values of other scripts / assets into Ambient Sounds.

If you (or anyone else that reads this!) want to integrate other assets with Ambient Sounds please feel free to reach out if you are having trouble, we should be able to get a preliminary support for you going until we do official integrations.

 

So Ambient AI is more for background AI?

IE my use case would be having 100s of background soldiers that you don't actually fight but give the battle scene more scale with moving AI.

Also what benefits does this audio solution offer over something like Master Audio?

I own all your other products so I almost just jumped on this but I'm trying to get better and ask questions before purchases lol. Thanks!

 

This is the use case we are largely aiming for i.e. background AI. We are not seeking to be all singing all dancing ai that does everything under sun.. and is consequently impossible to use.

I am not familiar with master audio so I can not make a comparison. The focus is on both ease of use and power. Ambient sounds makes it easy to add "sequences" of sounds / music to your scene to bring it to life.

Sequence playback can be both location and event driven, and there is a "modifier" system to allow you to dynamically control how this works.

 

How to use it with audio mixer? I want to add echo effect (Reverb Zones) when player enter the cave.

 

You would need to choose output type "Local Position" or "Player Position", and then add a custom prefab with an audio source on it in the "Output Prefab" slot.



Ambient Sounds will then spawn and use this prefab for audio playback. This means you can configure this prefab as you need it, for example you can select a mixer group in the Audio Source. For Reverb you then can either add a reverb filter to the prefab, or use Reverb Zones in the scene.
You can check in the demo scene as a reference, for example the bird sounds around the player use a custom prefab for playback as well, and there are also multiple reverb zones in the scene.

 

Hi-

Nice asset- have it working well, but:

Cross-fade does not seem to work. Here are settings:



Any idea why this could be happening?

 

Hi, I tried to reproduce the problem, but crossfade does seem to work for me. Could you please try the following in a new scene:

1. Add an Ambience Manager to the scene
2. Add a new Global Sequence with the following clips (included with ambient sounds) & settings:


(these should be the same settings as you have in your sequence, just different clips)

If you press play, the cheap techno sound should crossfade to the chatter and vice versa. Can you please test if this works for you?

 

Thanks for the response!

Okay- this played fine. However, When I brought my audio into the exact same sequence, the transitions disappeared.

Is there a certain audio encoding that is required? I used WAVs, all 50 seconds in length.

Thanks again, and let me know!

 

Hi- I think you'll have a better chance of diagnosing the issue, if you have access to a sample of the issue.

I have uploaded a project file, here:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Note in the screenshot below, I created two sequences. They are identical, aside from the audio files they reference.

When you put "test" into the ambience manager, the audio & fades work perfectly.

When you put "test_mymusic" into the ambience manager, the audio files play, but the fades do not work.



Hope we can figure this out!

Thanks again!

 

Hi, thanks for the sample project, we were able to reproduce the issue there, we can now dig deeper into it in development to find out what is going on. We will get back to you when we know more.

 

Truly appreciated.

 

An update: The error was found, it was indeed a bug in Ambient Sounds where the track time could be overwritten by the track fading time which then resulted in the track skipping to the next instead fading properly. A new version for Ambient Sounds will be available soon.

 

Hi, just a suggestion, could you change the font for your doc into something more readable as body text, I am pretty sure the current font choice is more suitable for title, and my reading speed slows way down.

Good for people scanning doc to decide if they want to purchase this asset

 

I am wondering how the "audio area" is implemented, the doc doesn't mention rigidbody or collider at all, meaning, is the bounding box/sphere checked using a different method?

EDIT: looking at this further, looks like the player position (transform) is used, understandable, it's for ambient sounds after all.

EDIT 2: I got another question, can we place and update these audio area at runtime? I imagine placing them at runtime could be faster or slower than built-in box colliders, depends on how they are implemented. (eg. how the system scan audio area and decides which ones the player is in.)

 

Yes, the system uses the player / Audio Listener transform to determine whether it is in one of the Audio Areas or not.

Yes, Audio Areas can be placed and manipulated during runtime as well.

 

Hi, your asset store listing says that all Procedural Worlds assets are on sale for the May sale, except this one doesn't seem to be.

 

It is. Normally i think it is either 47 or 57

 

Ok, great! Will be ordering. It's strange that the Sale tag isn't showing up. It's also not displaying in the results when you check "On Sale Only", could be lost sales for you.

 

The assets for the "official" May Sale with the sale tag are picked by unity and then highlighted on the front page, we added an individual sale for Ambient Sounds. Thanks for supporting us! If you have any questions with Ambient Sounds please post here or send us a ticket via our support system, or join the Procedural Worlds discord.

 

This seems like a great asset.

I was reading the documentation and could not find any info on how to do a basic rough mix in a sequence. I understand that the 3D position of sound will determine the level of each sound but you still have to do a quick balance when importing the different sounds into the sequence. How do you balance the level between the individual sounds and music within a same sequence in the ambiance manager. Are the individual sound volume adjustment hidden somewhere?

Thanks!

 

Please excuse the delayed reply, we are currently getting a lot of questions and support requests due to the may sale. There currently is only a possibility to adjust the volume per sequence, but not per clip in the sequence. But I think it would make sense to have this, as you pointed out it is difficult to adjust a single clip whose volume might be out of line with the other clips. I will add this to our backlog & we will check if it can be added within reasonable effort.

 

Thanks for the reply. I bought your marvellous asset anyway because It seems to be another great and simple option for 3d sound in unity. But It would be great not having to deal with another audio software to level the audio clips before importing them in "ambient sounds".

A few questions. Can this asset play first order ambisonic sound? Or can it be use with the resonance audio component? The resonance component allows importing and playing ambisonic quad channel file so this would be great.

Thanks!

 

Yes and yes. If you set up an audio source prefab as output type, you can set it up for playback ambisonic of sound when following the directions in the unity manual: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/AmbisonicAudio.html
Same goes for resonance audio: Since resonance audio uses additional components that need to be attached to the Audio Sources, you can use it as well. We wanted to make a demo scene that demonstrates this as well, but did not get around to realize this yet.

 

Thanks for the quick reply. Great info and it confirmed what I thought.

 

When I import Ambient Skies into my real project I got those errors

https://i.gyazo.com/51ab8b70702266f7efbbc8481a352a24.png

It doesn't happen in an empty project, but I can't figure out how to fix it.

 

Do you happen to have another class in your project called PauseState that is not in a namespace?

 

It was in conflict with UPause Menu. While I'm nut much of a C# programmer, I've managed to figure out how to solve it. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction.

 

Hello,
What are the differences with Sectr Audio please?

 

Another great asset as always. Is there a recommended way to zone the entire terrain high area for lets say "High Wind" and the entire low area for "Birds/Nature" ? Or just make a large zone for each? thanks!

 

Sectr Audio and Ambient Sounds do have some intersection in functionality: Both can create Ambient Sound areas where you can play back music and background noises fitting to that area. However Ambient Sounds has more options to set up these areas and make them interactive during runtime, and especially to debug this interactivity.
SECTR has in turn some functionality that makes only sense with the levels being organized in SECTR sectors such as audio propagation.

As a recommendation, if you own Sectr already or you want to buy it anyway for the streaming capabilities, I would take a look at the ambient functionality to see if it is sufficient, if you need more control during runtime, Ambient Sounds would be interesting.
If you don't own either yet and you are mainly interested in creating different soundscapes in different areas of the game, I would recommend getting Ambient Sounds directly.

 

Thanks for the praise! This is one of the rare cases where the 1-dimensional audio areas become useful: You can set up 2 1-dimensional Audio areas on the Y-Axis that intersect with each other a bit so that the bird sounds fade out while the wind sounds fade in. Here is how the settings for the area could look like:



And here is how the two areas would be stacked on top of each other:



The idea is: These one dimensional areas only evaluate the players position on the y-axis, so if its y-coordinate is in the red area, the birds will play. As the player travels upwards the y-coordinate will enter the intersection area and then the wind area. You only would need to adjust the sizes / position of these areas so that they are sitting well on the terrain so that the intersection takes place at the desired height.

 

Thank you for the great answer and advice

 

Worked like a charm. thanks!