VaM 1.x Multi channel audio plugin?

[SlowScripter]

Wondering if this exists or is possible?

VR scene, let's say a cowgirl riding scene. The vocal audio like voices and breathing are played through the vr headset. While audio like skin slapping sounds, are sent to a separate Bluetooth speaker.

 

[hazmhox]

That's not what multichannel audio is. Multichannel is 2.1 / 5.1 / 7.1 etc...
What you're talking about is a multiple output system. And is probably not possible and for sure, does not exists.

For one, generally the audio signal is quite optimized and tends to be treated to be sent to a single output (your DAC/soundcard throught the output you are using, for instance your speakers). For instance, if you configure your audio settings in Windows, let's say for your Bluray player... you can tell it to send to your speakers or your headphones, not "send the music of the movie to speakers and the sound effects to the headphones" ( it's vulgarization/simplifying the concept, but you get the idea ).

And secondly, most audio engines are working with a single DAC/soundcard. In my years in dev, I haven't seen a single situation or experiment with either a vanilla audio engine ( Unity / Unreal Engine ) being able to define multiple DACs for the output. Nor the middleware ( FMOD / Wwise ) does.

More or less, let's say anyone wanted to do that, it would need a complete rewrite of the engines. It would need them to both be able to define multiple DACs for the output, but also completely rewrite the way you'd mix the final signal to allow the audio designer to send this or that sound to the proper output (and also handle fallbacks to a single output if you have only one). In other words: quite a tremendous task.

And before you are tempted to say that: yes, you can send sounds to a PS5 controller, but this is a specific case were the audio is specifically treated to be sent to a specific hardware (and needs massive optimization because it's sent on a very low bandwidth protocol, bluetooth).

Technically, you could probably design a system that would behave like the PS5 controller audio, but you would again have to write an engine that generates the sound, send it to the proper output, and give ways to the creators to use it.
Which would need you (or the creator) to build specific scenes with a specific audio design to work in the first place. You won't be able to take existing scenes and hope it would send the sounds to your new fancy system automatically.

Tell me if some things are not clear ^^

 

[SlowScripter]

Nah that sums it up mate
I didn't have high hopes on this, and figured it would take a massive amount of work to implement. Appreciate the detailed response, cheers Haz.

 

[Sally Whitemane]

That would be a very exotic audio setup - I think the Unity Engine audio may already be the dealbreaker here to achieve this.
One would have to dig through the Unity 2018.1 audio documentation to figure out if it's possible to write a custom plugin for this audio setup.

However, I can at least 100% confirm, VaM does support "multichannel" speaker setups like 5.1 for example.
It is just not accessible from the default VaM user interface. So a custom plugin is needed.

For more details you @SlowScripter can read the linked Discord conversation on this plugin overview-page:
https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/audioconfig.42086/
(I don't use Discord anymore for reason...)

Anyway - I like this out of the box thinking - I'm sure this would be very immersive

 

[SlimerJSpud]

While you may not be able to direct game audio to different output devices in the real world, you can play lots of tricks with spatialization in game. If you're playing sounds from assetbundles, you can have some sounds, like squishes activated by a trigger that play from an audiosource located near the pelvis. You can have background music playing from a set of speakers near the wall. All the moaning sounds should still go to head audio, but all sorts of other sounds could be localized in game space to enhance the immersion.