FMOD Studio Scatterers

kevinregamey [7:24 PM]

1.​ Scatterer modules have a 3D panner built in, but hidden, with a min-max of  .'' ​2.​ This means that if you put a 3D panner on the master track of an event with Scatterer, it's summing the attenuation curve with that of the hidden 3D panner in your scatterer module. ''3.​ From Joseph Harvey @ Firelight in my chat: "The scatterer NEEDS to have a 3D panner built in, because without 3D panning there would be no attenuation from scattering.". This makes enough sense to me I think - it's basically fundamentally how a 3D panner works, attenuating different speaker channels depending on the position of the sound in 3D space.'' ''​4.​ THAT SAID, if you want a given sound to be spawned within a given 3D spherical space, and for that sound instance to have its own roll-off of , you need to do it by nesting an Event Sound within that scatterer's playlist. In this case, the default roll-off of   would be ignored in place of the Event Sound's dedicated roll-off of  .'' ''​5.​ This is all fine, and makes enough sense I think (though I'm still in the midst of rewiring my understanding of this whole thing) but the fact is that this information is communicated literally nowhere. I read the documentation out loud, and Joseph said, "that info box in the documentation is inaccurate".

jamesdean [7:26]

Is the nested event sound in the scatter playlist empty? Used just to set attenuation and override the built in panner?'' ''

kevinregamey [7:29 PM] No, the default attenuation applies to ALL SINGLE SOUNDS in the playlist.'' ''All the single sounds you'd otherwise have there should INSTEAD be in a Multi Sound module in the nested event.

So, therefore, you could potentially have several different sounds with their own dedicated attenuation curves by having multiple nested events in the scatterer's playlist.

Does that make sense?'' ''

jamesdean [7:30 PM] ah ok, then chuck that nested event into the scatter playlist?'' ''

kevinregamey [7:30 PM] Yeah exactly.

So you'd have a playlist of a single nested event, typically.

(Additionally, from Joseph Harvey @ FMOD:) Any events that include 3D panner effect modules or position-based built-in parameters are 3D. Single sound modules that appear in scatterer sound module playlists are also 3D, as placing a single sound module in a scatterer sound module automatically applies a hidden 3D Panner effect to that single sound. As a result, any playlist entries that are single sound modules or whose associated events are 3D, are 3D playlist entries. All other playlist entries are 2D. Every time a scatterer sound module spawns an instance of one of its playlist entries, it feeds that playlist entry positional information generated from the scatterer sound module's "Min & Max Scatter Distance" properties. This is used to set the values of the playlist entry's 3D Panner effect module (if present) and its position-based built-in parameters (if present). (In fact, this is technically true of 2D playlist entries as well, but since 2D playlist entries by definition never have 3D Panner effect modules or built-in parameters, the positional data doesn't actually affect their behaviour in any way.)