Panning & Crossfades

The rest of my work on the project was focused on making mix tweaks and implementing the dynamic ambience.

1 ) Adjusting the panning

The main issue with the panning was that sounds would jump between hard-left to hard-right, even if the camera was only a few pixels off-center from the sound source. In addition, the sounds would decay way too quickly; the source would be on-screen but the sound would be barely audible.

Since this was my first time working with the Unity audio engine, I had to dig through the Unity docs as well as some YouTube videos. But in the end, I got the hang of how it worked. These are the curves I ended up with:

**Volume** — Decays logarithmically but then plateaus. I wanted sounds to be heard from further away because it’s important for the player to know what’s happening off-screen, for example, whether their base is under attack.

**Spatial Blend & Spread** — These helped soften the panning. The goal was to have the sounds on-screen occupying the front 60° while the remaining 60° on each side would be for sounds off-screen. This way the sonic information right in front of the player didn’t clash with the information coming from afar.
**Reverb Zone Mix** — I wasn’t using Reverb Zones, so this was not necessary. Because the whole map was the same ambient environment, I just used a static reverb. While it would’ve been cool to make sounds that were further away have more reverb, I had other things that were higher priority.

There is one thing I didn’t have time to play around with, but that I think would’ve been really neat.

The player can control the zoom of their camera, but the panning doesn’t change when you zoom in. It would have been nice to have everything spread out when you zoom in. (And maybe make the center sounds louder.)

2 ) Setting up dynamic ambience

In my previous blog post, I illustrated how the ambience should change depending on the time of day. While a similar functionality had been implemented for the music, it had yet to be implemented for the ambience. So I got to it!

Initially, I thought this would be a simple task of building off of the existing functionality for fading the music, but my needs turned out to be a bit different. The music only has to change when it turns from day to night, or vice versa. But the ambience needed to change two more times. Here’s what the cycle looks like:

day calm -> day rough -> night calm -> night rough

“calm” and “rough” refer to the intensity of the waves

The existing day-night cycle was triggered by a day-night-cycler script that broadcast day/night events. Other scripts, like the audio manager, could subscribe to a certain event to receive updates like whether it was day or night.

Initially, I thought it would be easier to package the “calmness” of the waves into the day/night event, but this started to break other code and didn’t turn out to be as useful as I thought.

So I added another event for the cycler to broadcast, this one being for calm/rough waves. This was easier than packaging the calmness and the time of day into one broadcast because I would only ever need to change ambient tracks when the calmness changed. And since the audio manager script was storing the time of day anyway, I could just check what time of day it was whenever I received a calm/rough update, and fade accordingly.

3) Writing a crossfade function

I was struggling to adapt the existing music-fading code for the ambience, so I wrote a new crossfade function that was more general. This new function could also be run as a coroutine, which made it was easier to use. I followed this tutorial by Comp-3 Interactive, making a few adjustments to suit my needs.

Mixing