GS_AudioPro - premium tier
This feature ships in GS_AudioPro, the premium audio gem. It requires the free GS_Audio gem and extends it. See the audio overview for the tier map.The free gem places sounds by direction and distance — a sound behind a wall is quieter because it is further away, not because the wall is there.
Geometric acoustics makes the wall matter. Mark up your level and sounds get occluded by what is between them and the player, and pick up reverb from the room the player is actually standing in.
For settings and behaviour detail, see the Framework API reference.
Contents
- Setting It Up
- Marking Up a Level
- Choosing Materials
- Tuning Occlusion
- Tuning Reverb
- What It Does Not Do
- See Also
Setting It Up
Geometric acoustics is off until you turn it on.
- Select your Pro Audio Manager.
- Tick Geometry Enabled.
- Leave Occlusion and Reflections on unless you specifically want one without the other.
Nothing happens yet — the simulation has no geometry to work with until you mark some up.
Marking Up a Level
You do not hand the system your level meshes. You mark up the parts that matter acoustically — walls, floors, doorways, the big surfaces that shape a room.
Two components do it:
| Component | Use it when |
|---|---|
| Audio Shape Geometry | You already have a Shape component on the entity. Quads become planes, Boxes become boxes. Usually the easier option. |
| Audio Geometry | You want to author a box volume directly. |
A practical starting point: block out the room a player will spend the most time in, tag its walls and floor, and listen. You will hear the difference immediately, and you can decide from there how much of the rest of the level is worth marking up.
Choosing Materials
Every piece of geometry carries a material preset. Fifteen ship, in three useful groups:
| Group | Presets | What they do |
|---|---|---|
| Hard | Generic, Brick, Concrete, Ceramic, Glass, Plaster, Wood, Metal, Rock | Bounce sound. Bright, long reverb — stone corridors, tiled bathrooms. |
| Absorptive | Gravel, Carpet | Soak sound up. Short, dull reverb — carpeted rooms, soft ground. |
| Soft barriers | Curtain, Blanket, Door, Drape | Let sound through, muffled. |
The soft-barrier group is worth knowing about. A curtain across a doorway does not silence what is behind it, it dulls it — the effect people usually fake with a low-pass filter. Here you get it by picking the right material.
If none of the presets fit, Custom exposes all seven coefficients directly.
Tuning Occlusion
Two modes:
- Raycast — one ray. A sound is occluded or it is not. Cheap.
- Volumetric — samples a sphere around the source, so sound leaks partially around edges. Costs more.
If occlusion sounds like a switch flicking as the player walks past a doorframe, use Volumetric. That partial-occlusion behaviour at edges is exactly what it exists for. Occlusion Radius controls how wide the sampled sphere is.
Tuning Reverb
Reverb comes from the geometry around the player, and updates as they move.
Two behaviours that are deliberate, so you do not go hunting for a bug:
- It eases between rooms. Walking through a doorway blends the reverb rather than snapping it. Reflection Smooth Time controls how long that takes — set it to
0if you want an instant change. - It does not get quieter as you walk away from a sound. The room sounds like the same room wherever you stand in it, while the dry sound still falls off with distance. That is correct, and it is what makes a large space feel large.
Pick one source of reverb
Do not also run the Reverb effect or an influence zone where geometric reflections apply. Both fill the same role, and running both puts two rooms on the same sound.What It Does Not Do
- Reverb cannot tell your room from the one next door. It is computed around the player, so a sound sealed in an adjacent room still feeds the same reverb.
- An occluded sound still feeds the reverb. Occlusion muffles the direct sound; it does not stop the source exciting the room.
- It only knows about geometry you marked up. Render meshes and physics colliders are not consulted.
- There is no baking. Everything is computed at runtime.
See Also
For settings and behaviour detail:
For related systems:
- The Basics: Spatial Audio — the base layer this builds on
- The Basics: Mixing & Effects — the manual reverb this replaces
- The Basics: Audio Pro — the rest of the premium tier
Get GS_Audio
GS_Audio — Explore this gem on the product page and add it to your project.