How do I stop sounds of specific tags at a specific duration of an audio track?

Disclaimer:

Alright, so,

Like it is common practice to place all your sprites on a sprite sheet, I have tried to do the same with audio.

I have all my sound effects relevant to combat in my naval battle game on one audio track.

Now, before we continue, I've got to say the problem I'm having has *nothing* to do with the fact I have all my audio on one track, rather, this trick is pretty efficient and expedites download times in certain edge cases.

So yes, I am using this, and separating them isn't going to fix the problem.

I have looked everywhere for this question, so I apologize if this was asked before, (It has been but unfortunately the person that was having trouble wasn't as experienced in C2-3 & in their case of this problem happening, the solution given to them was far less precise than what my problem requires.)

Now, with that out of the way, what is the problem I'm having?:

When you play a sound, you associate that sound with a tag, that way you can stop specific *groups* of that audio-by-tag or modify them.

This is where the problem starts, for sounds that play frequently stopping audio of a specific tag stops ALL audio of that tag, which is to be expected yes, but frustrating.

Let me go further into detail to give some more context, why am I stopping sounds?

I have a cannon firing SFX, this will inevitably play so many times that the volume will increase exponentially until the sound ends, which, by the way, isn't one specific sound effect because all of them are stored on the same file.

The obvious solution is playing them as separate audio like I said above that I wouldn't be doing, but, for development's sake its much faster for me to keep them in one place as I happen to be the one that produces these sounds, which is the other reason.

What I've tried:

1.)

So, I have to create an audio limiter, that counts the number of times a tag is played and attempts to clamp it so that no new sounds are being played at the same duration.

But predictably I can only do this by adding a number to each tag, and randomizing when a sound should stop.

I.E

play SFX "shoot" & round(random(1, 4))

if shoot is playing & duration >= 4 seconds (length of that specific section of audio) stop SFX "shoot" & round(random(1,4))

The problem with this is, there is a chance that this does not stop the audio, and so it continues playing until this function is ran again, and the dice finally lands on stopping that audio of that tag.

2.)

I was thinking I could probably combine the is playing condition and specify in its expressions box that if a tag is playing,

"SFX" is playing & audio.duration >= 4, stop the audio.

Does not work, seems to ignore the expression as though the condition only cares about the first valid tag thrown in there, never mind the fact there is a logical AND checking to see if that audio reached a certain duration.

Kind of disappointing, but then again, it's likely I'm doing that wrong and that it is in-fact possible.

3.)

Google's AI told me you can stop the last played instance of a sound by using an empty tag "".

Uh, tried it and it did nothing, I'm guessing this isn't a thing.

Even if it were, I think this would also stop anything else playing recently, of any tag instead of specifically what I want it to stop.

Shame.

Verdict:

In my opinion it would be far more efficient if there was a way to look for a tag, and have the option to test for duration, or some way to instance specific instances of a tag.

If you could stop an audio track of tag by AGE or something, so much better than stopping ALL instances of that sound, or trying to roll some dice to split them up into instances.

If I had separated my sounds, ultimately Id STILL run into this problem, except for individual sounds.

Before you ask how it's possible for a single sound to play *that* many times where even separating audio into variations isn't enough:

I want you to picture 20 ships on your side, 20 ships on the NPC side, each ship can have upwards of 50 cannons (technically it's just 20 turrets (1 for each ship), but I have a formula that divides the rate of fire according to the number of guns a ship has) this number comes from a number value stored in a ship and youll quickly reach 100 or so instances of that tag playing within a minute of firing.

to be clear a ship, is just 2 instances, Im not literally adding 50 turrets to each ship, its just clever math and fire rate manipulation on one turret per ship.

I'm not going to reduce the scope of my battles because it's a key part of the game's identity, or it will be.

So, I'm posting this here hoping there is an elegant solution to this that I haven't thought of.

Of course, I'll still be trying stuff out in the background like I usually do with these posts, because I do have to wait for a response and obviously there's a chance Ill close the post early if I find a solution on my own.

Oh, I'm open to using plugins or Javascript to achieve the desired effect, so if what I'm doing isn't possible throw me some suggestions on what I can do to force a solution with these options.

I have zero clue how to send videos from my computer to construct, I swear that was a thing you could do but I don't see the option to anywhere.

Having to upload a youtube video to send videos is kind of time consuming.

So here is a picture of my events relevant to what I'm doing.

It sort of works, but not all the time, not sure why.

I'm guessing the array isn't being filled out properly.

Let me see if this hyper link works to a local file, doubt it will but I'll give it a shot.

file:///C:/Users/cjdan/Videos/WhatsWrong.mp4

Edit: it did not work, no surprise there but would of been nice if it did.

In the loop you need to update shoottag. It should be array.at(i). As is it’s just stopping the shoottag of the last sound you started.

Edit:

That only partially matches the pseudocode i sent. I’ll have to screenshot the events later i suppose if it’s not clear.

Nope as far as I know, its filling the array correctly, it just doesn't seem to see the time limit at (I, 1) of the array.

Alright I got it to finally read the array:

You can see the changes I did on the right-hand side.

Least, I think its reading it.

In the gif I have acouple variables Im keeping track of on the left-hand side.

Relevant ones being:

"DurationTest" which isn't important to its function, but it does show that the duration maximum is being set each time we create a new entry in the array.

The correct time is 4 seconds maximum.

"ShootTag" Is being properly set to "shoot"&shootID.

"ShootID" Is incrementally going up each time the function is called, as intended.

I Is incrementally going up, however I notice that it's supposed to reset back to 0 every tick, this does not happen.

Either way I don't think this is entirely relevant to stopping audio, because all this does I think, is act as the index incrementing up for each new entry, even if this didn't work it should still stop the first entry on the list (I'm guessing), which it doesn't do.

Changes I made:

Some changes I did you might not immediately see that I might need your opinion on:

on line 90 I changed "Audio.Duration(tag) >= Sounds.At(I, 1)" to "Audio.Duration(tag) = Sounds.At(I, 1)"

because for some reason it just wouldnt create a new entry in the array, or play any sounds if I didnt do it this way.

Verdict:

Still doesn't work, but at least its closer to working than I started out with.

PS:

Also, your gradual audio thingy is a nice touch but I mixed my audio to taper off, so this isn't required to get this to function.

I do appreciate it though.

It also seems to only gradually change audio with every new entry added, which I dont think its supposed to do, I think you intended for it to gradually get quieter as the audio progresses.

media.giphy.com/media/VANm4b6ZiJziAVskcc/giphy.gif

Edit: I've been trying to get links to work for awhile now and I guess they just don't.

I uploaded my gif to giphy and copied a link, I assume its not working because my account is new? I don't know.

I've never seen a self-advert bot on this platform before, not cool.

Anyway, I'll try out what I see in the capx, I appreciate your help R0J0.

I assumed I'd get something wrong but I'm not going to do what most people do where they take a solution face-value and not tweak it to get it to work in the instance, or to understand how a solution works.

Otherwise, I wouldn't have known there were acouple issues with it and would of flat out said it was "broken" without giving any helpful feedback to iterate.

Edit:

Alright, I got it to work.

This is definitely more extensive than the first version, function to array allows more sounds to be played.

My project does have some separate audio, but I just didn't see the need to separate all audio, I have SFX in "packages" that I think are far more elegant to produce and add to my project than hundreds of individual sounds.

In theory this would let me play SFX & Music at the same time and keep track of both.

Music is separate, of course, but it would be interesting to see if I can make this even more elaborate to do what triple A studios do where they have separate tracks, but they add a track to build intensity, or subtract to decrease it, so it's like they *make* the music while you play.

If I do decide to do that Ill post an updated version of this project because I think that's a rather novel way to add-onto what you already built, Perhaps incase they'd like to add it to their game.

I'm thinking to get this to work Id likely need to create some method of timing it, shouldn't be too hard.

Maybe I'll try that a week from now.

Thanks again, R0J0.