Sound Management Help

Question

I just learned how to implement a Sound Manager and put sounds into it. The problem is, I'm making a platformer and I have a player, and two different types of enemies who all have footstep sounds. The main issue is that I'm playing all the sounds from the same sound manager and I made the footstep sounds of the player to play like this:

  public void PlayMoveSound()
{   
    if(audioSrc.isPlaying == false)
    {
    randomMoveSound = Random.Range(0,5);
    audioSrc.PlayOneShot(moveSounds[randomMoveSound]);  
    }
}

I don't know how else to make it NOT sound like its playing 100 times per second so I did this. This gave birth to the issue that the looping audio which is the player's movement sound now blocks me from doing the same thing for the other characters' footstep sounds since it uses the same "audioSrc" AudioSource. Any hints on how different I can create a system for semi-looping audio?

Answer 1

A single Sound Manager is good for non-diegetic sounds like background music or interface sounds. It is usually not so good for diegetic sounds emitted by entities actually present in the game world.

When you want to add footsteps to a game object, then it's usually the better choice to add those footsteps as an audio source to that game object. The neat advantage of this is that this makes the sounds directional. So objects on the left side of the screen are louder on the left speaker while those on the right side are louder on the right speaker. This increases the grade of immersion of your game.

You should also use a separate audio source for every sound effect an entity can make. This prevents conflicts between looping and non-looping effects like you experience them right now. It also allows you to tune the audio source settings of each sound effect individually and send different sounds to different inputs of your audio mixer.

When you need to control those audio sources via script, then that controller script should be attached to the same game object as the audio sources.

But note that the Unity animation system can also be used for controlling audio sources. So when you are already using an animation controller, then you might have the walk animation control the footstep audio source as well.