GurtTractor wrote:

Decided I need to make a thing, exploration of concrete megastructures with some Steam Audio sound design magic basically. Been going a ton of testing with the technology going back and forth between Unity and Unreal, think I've pretty much settled for Unity for now, the general UI experience is just much much better and it seems less CPU heavy. Obviously the recent BS with Unity has me a little concerned, but I guess it's probably not going to affect me either way in the short term and a good user experience is more important for a first project. I'd also like to try out Godot but the Steam Audio plugin isn't quite there AFAICT so that's eliminated for now. With Unity I still need to do some testing and a little 'vertical slice' to figure out the whole HDRP rendering thing and see how easy/a pain in the ass it's going to be to do what I want, but I'm hopeful that it won't be too difficult considering that what I want to make is relatively sparse in geometric detail and variation. Maybe Unreal would end up being easier to work with in terms of the visual side, but things like the apparent total lack of a proper audio mixer panel with metering means it can do one tbh. Steam Audio is fucking great, it saddens me that amazing spatial/acoustics tech like this doesn't get more attention. There's such little content made with/about it and it seems like only a handful of people are working on it, meanwhile visual tech like RT gets a tremendous amount of fanfare and money chucked at it. I also tried out Microsoft's Project Acoustics, which sounds very nice and is great for portalling but lacks a proper simulation of acoustic reflections which is something I'm really wanting. It also requires lengthy bake times which isn't great for rapid prototyping. I was almost able to integrate both Project Acoustics and Steam Audio into a demo, but I think PA kind of overrides the SA reflections' HRTF direction which is no good. Probably fixable but the coding required is beyond me for now. Anyway I highly recommend having a play with Steam Audio, it's shockingly easy to get it going on Unity even for a total newbie. When I tried it initially a few years ago I got good results implementing it in a sample project in a couple of hours. It's also not bad getting it going in Unreal though the UI makes it substantially more confusing and awkward to get your head around. If anyone happens to have a scene, like a room or hall or whatever that has some sounds playing in it and would like to hear what it's like when you simulate the acoustics in there maybe give Steam Audio a try. Or send a zip of it my way and I'll set it up, I'd be quite happy to experiment with spaces other than the empty boxy places I'm only able to make right now.