Tool – Sound Tester
This tool was a joint effort with me and a programmer colleague and stemmed from problems in our workflow in a game project.
We asked our sound designers what problems and obstacles they had during the development and got the answer that the biggest problem was how long it took for them to be able to start to test sounds ingame. Before core gameplay and sound was implemented they could only work on creating new sounds without testing them in a correct environment, and when they could start to hear their work in game there was a lack of time to be able to iterate, mix and bugfix the sound and music.
The solution was to make a program that could load and play FMOD-banks and animations and could be used independently by a sounddesigner instead of relying on the implementation by a programmer.
At this stage the tool is mostly a proof of concept as we haven’t had the oportunity to get hands on feedback from a sound designer using the tool in production. Nevertheless I belive that with only small tweaks and adaptions to the current state of our engine it should prove a useful tool, hopefully in our next project.
Features
- Load FMOD-banks
- Add sounds to “Actions” through ImGui
- Add a model and animations to an action
- Play and pause actions, which play the animation and all attached sounds simultaneously. Allows the sounddesigner to sync SFX to animations
- Play Several Actions simultaneously to allow mixing of SFX and music