[RELEASED] TrueAudio - The new level of realism

There's one thing in Unity that's been bothering me for years. It's the fact that there is absolutely no built-in availability for object based occlusion or dynamic delay which makes the built-in audio system feel like it's lacking something extremely vital.

Imagine your next door neighbour listening to music very loudly, what do you hear? Do you hear crystal clear definition, lyrics, hi hats, the full spectrum? By default in Unity you could have 10 tons of concrete between your audio source and your listener and still make out every single detail of the audio track. TrueAudio fixes that, instantly and with minimal hassle.

Drag and drop the component to your audio source, quick-check the layermask and you're set. There are a few options for optimizations that you can tweak should you desire to do so, but I wanted to make this AS-EASY-AS-POSSIBLE for everyone to use without dozens of sliders, buttons and other sorts of distractions. Lightning fast integration, you'll be back working on your project in minutes.

Dynamic delay adds another layer of realism to your audio source but it can also be disabled depending on your use case. It makes your audio sources feel more rooted in their actual position by introducing a delay (a form of reverberation) with properties reliant on the surroundings.

All of the functionality in TrueAudio emulates real world data and approximations to make your results as credible as possible while still maintaining a low overhead. So as long as you're using realistic scale in your 3D projects (just as with the physics engine), you can expect TrueAudio to upgrade your game audio to the next level.

It comes with full documentation and troubleshooting to help you with the already extremely shallow learning curve. My main goal was to create a tool that makes your project development faster, upgrades the quality of your product without extra work, and ultimately supports your game audio on it's way to becoming modern and of a truly high standard.

TrueAudio, get it here.

 

Hi!
This seems interesting, but the demo video sounds like mono-sound to me. (using headphones, of course)
I'm looking for a true platform-independent audio spatializer, unlike the Occulus spatializer and DearVR, which use native plugins and are restricted to specific platforms.
I already use SpatialAudio from the Asset Store and it works, but it doesn't use a true HRTF and it's subtle, so I'm always trying to improve 3D audio while making it cross-platform.

Could you make a build of the demo from the video and share it with us here, so we can check the sound effect by ourselves?
Also, more detailed information about what TrueAudio actually does would be welcomed:
I see it manages audio occlusion, but to what extent?
Does it manage audio reflections on geometry or is it just a direct line-of-sight from listener to source?
Does it implement an HRTF for binaural effect?

Thanks

 

Thanks for the opening! Let's see... I see what you mean by the "mono-sound", it's actually caused by a slight oversight with the spatial blending of the audio which I am currently patching! I can make a public test build where you can move around and observe the audio for yourself, I will release it along with the patch later on.

Concerning HRTF, TrueAudio doesn't emulate it at the moment. It might in the future though especially if there's a great demand for it!

Now what TrueAudio actually does: It does manage audio occlusion by using reflections from the surrounding geometry and calculating approximations based on those reflections, same with the dynamic delay it implements. I don't wanna go too deep in to the technical side but to answer your question, it's not just a direct line-of-sight occlusion from listener to the source

It takes in to consideration the surrounding geometry, the thickness of the occluding obstacles and even the quantity of them (to a reasonable extent[resource considerations]). So the amount of obstacles between the virtual reflections-listener AND the sum of their thickness both factor in to the amount of "effect" being transmitted. In laymans terms: the bigger (or greater in number of) the obstacles between you and the audio source, the more muffled and obscure the sound.

The dynamic delay uses these virtual reflections aswell to approximate the amount of delay(A.K.A echo) caused by the surrounding geometry. The smaller the confinements, the shorter the delay, and vice versa. This helps root the audio source more to it's surroundings.

Just as with everything related to game dev, alot of the things TrueAudio does are approximations and estimations with basis on real life data, but with a right amount of compromises aswell to keep the component lightweight enough so it won't chew away tons of FPS. I wouldn't recommend using it to run actual real world audio simulations, but for videogames, it goes quite far

 

Very interesting.
How about performance? Would it be too expensive for mobile? (I'm thinking Nintendo Switch and Oculus Quest)
I look forward to the build demo.

 

Looks cool. Can this system also add reverb such as cars going through a tunnel?

 

I haven't tried it out on mobile but TrueAudio comes with a "precision" setting for each instance of the component and the precision has a direct correlation with performance so even in case using several instances with "ultra" precision settings wouldn't be viable for mobile implementations, something lower might work out nicely

I wanted to make TrueAudio cross compatible with the built-in reverb system so it wouldn't interfere with it in case users want to integrate it in to existing projects with existing reverb zones etc. I think the built-in reverb zones are quite good as they are so at the moment TrueAudio doesn't add any major reverberations aside from the dynamic delay which itself is a form of reverberation effect, a series of reflections to be more precise. To get a localized tunnel effect for my audio source, I would personally use TrueAudio with another reverb component (external or the built-in one) to get the desired effect.

PS. Demo coming soon, done patching. Need to upgrade the package online and build the demo for public testing.

 

Reverb zones work with the listener/camera position so if you are say a spectator by a tunnel and a car drives through the tunnel there is no reverb.

 

True enough. The thing is that realistic reverberations have such a vast amount of conditionals affecting them that writing a reverb extension which would introduce dynamic reverberations with plausible results AND minimal amount of tweaking on the user's end would almost be a project of it's own.

I'm not saying TrueAudio will never include such properties atleast to some extent (the included dynamic delay is a form of dynamic reverb and there could be other forms in the future) but at the moment it's not within the scope of this project to include a fully fleshed failsafe dynamic reverberation suite with it. Having such would make it much heavier resource-wise, it would also take tons of manhours to develop and thus it would also bump up the price tag. I wish to keep TrueAudio within the "hobbyist" price range so it's available to as many people as possible

I get where you're coming from though, I am not sure if the Asset Store is currently offering anything like of which you're talking about so there's a gap in the market. Maybe we'll see something like that in the future, hopefully we will.

In other news, the patch 1.1 is live and the test demo is now available for download @ https://istvanyoutube.itch.io/trueaudio ... WebGL has a very stripped support for audio so the component does not work there, thus the standalone.

 

Hi @Ichender, I bought your asset a while ago and I'm trying to add it to my game. Would it be possible to send me the demo you published in itch.io to have an example scene?