Current state of UE4 development

[hectorC]

Hello,

Since Resonance is now an open source effort and not developed by Google directly (at least that's my understanding), I was wondering, what is its current development status? Are developers needed to ensure its future survival? The UE4 version has stopped development at 4.19. I've had successfully changed the 4.19 Resonance source parts to build and work with 4.21 and 4.22. I was wondering if somehow these changes get included in this repo maybe Epic would be more inclined to update the included version? (currently stock at 1.0 since long time). Also, I was wondering if a standalone version of the plugin could be developed that doesn't require to build the whole engine. I'm willing to look into doing that but first (and for the sake of time efficiency) I wanted to ask here to get some advise from the developers.

I've worked with spatial audio for long time and I appreciate the developers' effort and the acoustic quality of Resoance. I hope it can remain alive!

Cheers,

Hector

[mgorzel]

Hi @hectorC,

Thanks so much for your interest in Resonance Audio UE4 integration! Yes, all the contributions are very welcome :) It is awesome to hear that you have already updated the plugin to work with 4.21/22! (In fact, it was already on my plate for some time, but I didn't get a chance to look into that yet after I moved to another project...). So, please feel free to send a pull request my way - I will try to review and test it as soon as I can! And yes, I think that could also be a sensible way of getting the update into Epic's mainland.

Cheers,

Marcin

[hectorC]

Thank you for your reply Marcin,

With just some modifications I was able to build the current version 1.2 of Resonance as a standalone plugin that can be placed in a project, without having to build the whole engine. I tested it briefly in 4.22 and at least audio worked, I still need to make sure that building to the different targets is successful (at least I will be able to test Android soon).

I've been wanting to bring the Unity reverb baking functionality to Unreal. So I was wondering if there has been any efforts done already in porting (and interfacing) unity_reverb_computer.cc so it works in Unreal.

Cheers,

Hector

[mgorzel]

That's absolutely awesome to hear Hector!

Re. the standalone version - I think the integrated plugin has also some advantages. For example, it should be readily available for users who don't compile the engine and download the binaries (this is also what other audio plugins do, btw). Also, UE4 devs help to make sure the plugin builds with the newest version of the engine, etc. Even more so, we were even considering integrating Resonance Audio source code directly, to use Unreal build system and possibly enable additional platforms.
When it comes to a standalone plugin, I agree it also makes sense, but that would definitely require a new project (the https://github.com/resonance-audio-unreal/UnrealEngine is for the UE4 integration), for example here in this repo. (For the standalone plugin I think it would no longer have to be private, as it won't have the engine code, but I would have to double check that). So there are some questions re. whether it would make sense to maintain two separate repos for the plugin, sync them, etc.

In the meantime, are you changes also easy to integrate with https://github.com/resonance-audio-unreal/UnrealEngine (and updating to 4.22)? In this way we could try to get the update into the UE4 main repo and the plugin could possibly be also updated in the downloaded version of the engine.

Re. reverb baking - excellent! No, to my knowledge there is currently no work being done on porting the reverb baking features into UE4 integrations. It would be awesome to have them! Maybe we could create a dev branch for that?

Cheers,

Marcin

[hectorC]

Hello Marcin,

Thank you again for your great insights. Honestly what makes me feel compelled to create a standalone version of the plugin is the frustration I feel when I see third party solutions taking long time to be updated by either Epic or the third party developers (and both blaming each other for it, for example Steam Audio) and as a Unity developer (at the company I work for, I develop using both UE4 and Unity) seeing how easy it is for Unity developers to experience speedy updates and easiness of installation. I understand that both universes are very different but I personally would love to see UE4 improving in this area. The only reason really to keep it separate (and I believe yes, it could be public, as I've seen are other standalone UE4 plugin projects) would be to avoid all of this.

On the other hand, I'm going to try to get the 4.22 integration done and I'll do a pull request. The changes are indeed easy to integrate with https://github.com/resonance-audio-unreal/UnrealEngine. Hopefully once it's there Epic can do a point release update of Resonance. After that I hope to start looking into porting reverb baking (I do this on my spare time) and once I've done some progress and it looks like it is feasible, then it would be great to have a dev branch for it.

Cheers,

Hector

[Kleptine]

Hi,

Are there any updates on this? We are actively attempting to use Resonance audio, and just updated to 4.22.1. What are the rough changes needed to get it working? Oddly Resonance 4.19 seems to compile fine on 4.22.1, but Wwise has trouble finding it.

Any chance you have a diff I could look at?

Thanks!

[Qianfulong]

Any update on this?

[hectorC]

From what the audio devs at Epic have said (YouTube streams or forum comments) I gather that they have been doing maintenance and additions to the plugin source included in the main engine. I'm not sure if they have pushed the changes here but I guess we could compare the source of both. I don't think they have added major features but at least they've made it more stable and cross-platform. If I remember correctly, this happened either in 4.23 or 4.24. I haven't had the time to work on it as I wished before (mostly lack of time but also I've been using Steam Audio and Oculus Audio much more).

[Tetsujinfr]

From what the audio devs at Epic have said (YouTube streams or forum comments) I gather that they have been doing maintenance and additions to the plugin source included in the main engine.

You mean the resonnance plugin is already in the main branch of the UE4 for versions 4.23 etc?

I am trying to use Resonnance with UE4.23 or more recent versions under Linux. Steam audio and Occulus do not have targets for the Linux plateform.