Dear Adobo, We (many developers) are having some severe issues with the
current developing workflow for sounds, I notice these issues first with SU6
to be honest… and waited for SU7 since I thought maybe it would be fixed
automatically with the latest version. Unfortunately this was not the case and
the issue remains, this is what happens when you tweak any sounds for your
aircraft project via sound.xml or you re-compile a .PCK sound via WWISE:
- Your airplane is on the tarmac or in the air, and you want to tweak a sound, for example a volume… or include a new sound via sound.xml which can be a new wwise sound or a new .wav sound.
- You edit the sound.xml, let’s say you change the volume of a .wav or added a new sound with the correct variable, or changed a variable to reflect WWISE packages or how your .wav should be fired depending of a variable…
- You save everything, go to the sim and click “build”… the build process goes and finishes… now you have zero sounds… all gone… so you cannot test.
- You need to close MSFS… which now fails to close properly… despite being back at your desktop, you hear the background sound of MSFS… you have to kill it via task manager…
- Now you have to restart the sim, reload your project… reload your flight and test your sound change…
- If you need to tweak further… the cycle starts again… if you re-compile a .PCK via wwise the same symptoms occurs… if you change your aircraft .PCK file to another same symptoms occur. and in many cases you get CTDs.
As you can appreciate, it is incredible difficult to get your sound working
properly like this. Other developers suffering the same fate with sound
editing gave me the following steps as workaround:
- Make sound adjustment.
- Use Aircraft Selector window to change to a different aircraft.
- Use Project Editor to close and reopen the Project.
- Rebuild the Project.
- Use Aircraft Selector to change back the original project aircraft,
- Test change.
- Repeat above.
Although with the steps above you avoid CTDs and restarting the sim, the
process is also very cumbersome and super slow , it just takes far too long
to get things done… many weeks, possibly months depending on the size of your
project… I wonder how is the Asobo team working with sounds? surely the
workflow must be different or they would be seeing the same issue we see? or
are we missing something with our workflow? if so, can we please get some
advise how we should be doing things? In my ideal world I would like to be
able to change either sound.xml or the .PCK file from wwise, hit rebuild and
test immediately, during tweaking of sounds we can do easily 50 to 100
changes per hour with other platforms. This is in order to be sure things
are firing correctly during different sequence of events… with MSFS on its
current state, we can barely do 5 to 10 changes per hour, this is because: A)
The cumbersome steps to test any change in order to avoid the platform from
collapsing under our feet. B) The slow process to build now projects with SU7.
So we need severe improvements to the sound building system so we can to work
faster, this will help surely your team and all 3rd party developers to
increase the quality of current products. Thanks in advance, Simbol
Regards, Sylvain