While working with sounds and many actors across your level, you can easily find yourself overwhelmed with the amount of audio being output. This is amplified by not knowing the systems for the engine properly and implementing sounds without considering important audio control elements beyond volume sliders. This can leave your players with a very unsatisfactory experience.

There is a relatively simple solution to this problem: sound attenuation. Sound attenuation is the process in which you provide the ability for the engine to determine what volume your audio cues should be played based on distance from the camera and at what rate that sound should drop in volume as you leave the range of the sound source.

The inner radius is the point as to which the sound will be played at full volume. The falloff distance is the point at which the sound should basically be muted. There is another element to this: attenuation function.

Attenuation function handles the curve at which the audio drops off. In the above screenshot the dropdown of "Natural Sound" has been selected, to provide a reasonable facsimile of a natural attenuation one would expect from the real world with sound.

Another important element available in the arsenal of Unreal Engine's Attenuation setting component is the ability for sound to be occluded by objects in the world based on chosen channels (ie: Visibility, Camera, Pawn, etc).

Implementing this option (off by default), you can limit the excessive audio output that the player receives and vastly improve the user experience. The choice of channel will depend upon what objects or circumstances you want to be occluding your audio.

author: Clinton Butler
Posted on 6/2/2023