Unreal Engine 5.5 is a major release for artists of all kinds. On the audio side, the free-to-start platform has new tools for visualizing and debugging, powerful Audio Widgets for UI interactions, and a slew of MetaSounds improvements for workflow, quality of life, and targeting different platforms. Oh, and – finally, there’s reverb.
I’ll look at both Unreal’s sound and visual capabilities, starting with a first introduction to sound. There aren’t any fundamental changes to MetaSounds or the available sound objects; it still seems a major market here could be third-party modules for MetaSounds. That does not mean this is a minor release, though.
Reverb
“Hey, where’s the reverb?” was a reasonable question plenty of us had asked digging into MetaSounds in the past. TheSoundFXGuy spotted that 5.5 finally added a Reverb Node to this release, and there’s this brilliant video:
Oh, and it was possible to build your own reverb before, which also gets interesting – including these interesting solutions here using convolution. (It seems various folks tried working with a bunch of delays, so building up their reverb from scratch.)
Audio Insights
Epic describes Audio Insights, in developer-speak, as a tool for “profiling and debugging audio.” It’s basically a set of very useful metering, though, with the ability to save tab layouts and work in a standalone mode remotely – so, for instance, with a game/project audio designer collaborating with other members of the team. It’s very useful for that, though; our entire mixing/mastering paradigm is based on linear recorded music, and thinking interactively is different (and important).
MetaSounds is more usable
I’m actually happy not to see a bunch of hot new features, as what it seems Epic has been doing on MetaSounds is cleaning house a bit, solving some usability wrinkles. Here’s the list from the release notes. (I have to find out what the new console commands are and some other details – stay tuned.)
New console commands
Don’t need to click canvas before playing graph w/ spacebar
Get Last Index helper node
Improving convert from preset workflow
Dropdown menu supporting arrow keys
Add play/stop button to sound previewing
Fast input promotion
Simple-view options
Hide unconnected pins
Right-click create MS Source from CB
Clear unused inputs
Add getname to wave asset
Clearing delay line audio
Find-in-references support
Audio Widgets!
This one is cool – slick UI widgets for your MetaSounds (or other UE audio) creations. There are already nice slider/fader, encoder, and meter widgets, as you’d expect coming from tools like Max. And they’re all based on materials, meaning you can create your own. A lot of artists are using Unreal Engine as a solo creation tool for audiovisual work – which means it is completely free, as almost no artist is going to come anywhere near the revenue targets where Unreal starts to cost money. For that, you can immediately go crazy with this, as you don’t have to worry so much about UI performance across platforms. I even imagine we’ll soon see people sharing custom widgets.
MetaSounds offers new features for targeting platforms
So this is a big one, not only for the obvious case of game developers targeting more platforms, but even potentially for musicians and artists wanting to work across different mobile and desktop targets with Unreal Engine. It might be even more important for the music case, where you can’t just say, “hey, I want to make something for high-end PC gamers.”
There are two new features. One is MetaSounds Pages, which swaps out inputs and properties depending on the platform target. It supports per-platform details, has preset support, and Epic claims can create “dramatically simpler/cheaper graphs on lower-end platforms without changing gameplay.”
There’s also MetaSound Relative Render Cost, which uses a dynamic voice count in a MetaSound to better scale MetaSounds on limited platforms. Basically, MetaSounds get costly when you have larger graphs or are playing multiple MetaSounds concurrently, and can (cough) bottleneck the CPU for the whole game engine. This improvement should give you an independent metric that you can use across platforms and give you the chance to reduce the amount of simultaneous computation you’re doing to work better in limited-CPU contexts. There’s a new meter (shown right next to CPU) for debugging to give you feedback, too.
Now, this, of course, is part of the answer to the question, “Do game devs still prefer dedicated audio engines like WWISE?” Yes, MetaSounds – while always very cool tech and massive amounts of fun for us in the music and audio world – is also a younger, less-proven tech compared to some of the engines widely used across the industry. There is a lot to support across platforms, and the very accessibility and open-ended nature of MetaSounds also means musicians can abuse it in ways that negatively impact scaling and portability. I’m guessing these changes are one step toward a more industry-ready solution. But in the meantime, it does give MetaSounds advocates some tools to begin to use this in production, and it’s welcome even just for use as a solo artist.
There’s a lot more in 5.5, which I’ll be looking at now that it’s out – but if you’re impatient, enjoy the release notes!
