How many simultaneous sounds can be played at once?
TL;DRThere is currently a hard limit of 256 simultaneous sounds set in Wwise, but playing that many isn't desirable because human perceptual bandwidth is limited, so the aim is to manage what the player hears.
You mean in the game or just in the universe in general, in reality? It's a very open question. In the game, right? I think there's actually a hard limit of 256 at the moment. I think I set that myself in the Wwise project. So that is literally how many you would. And again, that's one of those ones where people assume that more is better, and actually it kind of isn't. Like I said earlier in the show, we spend quite a lot of time working out what the player should be hearing from moment to moment. So actually playing 256 at once isn't really a desirable place to be. There's only so much perceptual bandwidth we have as humans, at least most of us. And that's why it needs managing a lot better a lot of the time.
I think you can only perceive 12 individual sounds at any one time. As individual sounds, you can only track 12 in the real world.
We're about to start a sound thread. How many sounds can the human ear hear?
Analog versus digital. Well, there's a lot of differences between them. There's persistence of vision and persistence of audition, I think they technically call it. They're quite different things. So we think about it quite a lot, actually; that's what I do.
That's the thing: you can have a really, really nasty picture but great audio, and you perceive it. But then if you have a great picture and nasty audio, then you can't engage with it at all.
It actually generally degrades the perceived quality of the visual.
Yeah, so good audio can make something bad look better.