Attenuation#

Back To Audio

Spatial audio is positional sound in-game. Therefore, as the listener moves away from it, we expect the sound to falloff and vice versa. This falloff (I.e. the way the sounds fades) is what is known as attenuation.

Formally, attenuation is a mathematical function which maps the distance between the source and listener to a volume value.

Below, we see three different attenuation functions: linear, logarithmic and inverse. Linear gives a proportional falloff as the distance increases while logarithmic and inverse model a more realistic falloff.

The x-axis represents distance between the source and listener while the y-axis represents the perceived volume.

In GameKit, these curves can be modelled by implementing the AudioAttenuation interface and its attenuate method.

The attenuate method is called with the following arguments and should return a 0 - 1 ratio of the max volume:

1. Distance between the audio source and the listener
2. Minimum possible distance defined by the audio shape
3. Maximum possible distance defined by the audio shape

GameKit ships with one (1) attenuation implementation which is LinearAudioAttenuation class.

Public Methods#

Method	Description
attenuate	Returns a value between 0 and 1 representing the falloff based on the distance