Feature: Steam Audio Reflection and Path Effects #1658
Description
Which component should be improved?
Audio
Describe your feature suggestion in more detail
Add support for advanced Steam Audio features such as reflection and pathing.
These features are fairly advanced and expensive (performance-wise) because they involve raytracing to simulate. We already support occlusion via a sound operator, but that uses the engine's tracing facility and only traces from the listener directly to a source.
This will also involve constructing level geometry and feeding it to Steam Audio.
Features
- Volumetric sound sources (i.e. sounds that do not originate from a single point, but from a sphere)
- Reflections/reverb
- New surfaceproperties.txt keys for absorption across 3 frequency bands
- Reflection probes and compile-time baking (for performance)
Entities
Names subject to change
audio_probe- An audio probe involved in the baking of simulation data.
Tools
- Add a separate standalone tool to generate baked audio reflection data. This could also be integrated into existing tools like vbsp or vrad.
- Add a surface flag to block audio reflections, or just use a custom surface property with 100% absorption of audio on a material