11. Editing During Live Update

Live update is a way of connecting FMOD Studio to your game as it runs, allowing you to update and monitor audio content in real time. This chapter focuses on how you can use live update while editing your FMOD Studio project.

With live update enabled, almost any change you make to your FMOD Studio project during a live update session becomes audible in your game as immediately as your network connection speed permits. For example, if you import a new audio asset and add it to one of the events playing in your game, you will hear your game begin to play that asset within moments.

Being able to hear the changes being made as you make them means that you can tweak, adjust, and mix your game's audio content live. This reduces the amount of time and effort required to iterate on your game's audio content.

Nearly any change to a project can be propagated to your game using live update. The only thing that won't propagate to your game is changes to your game's .strings.bank file, such as may be caused by creating, renaming, or moving events in FMOD Studio. If you make such a change, you will need to rebuild your FMOD Studio project's master bank to update the .strings.bank file before using the new event names and paths in your game's code.

If you create a new event during a live update session, you will need to add appropriate triggers for that event to your game if you want your game to play it. Similarly, if you change an event's path to something other than what your game currently uses to identify it, or replace an event that your game identifies by GUID, that event will not play until you update your game code to use the new path or GUID.

As with changes made to your FMOD Studio project in other circumstances, changes made to your FMOD Studio project during a live update session only become a permanent part of your game if you then save and build the FMOD Studio project and copy the built banks into your game. If you do not build and copy the banks to your game, the changes you make during a live update session will no longer apply to your game once the live update session is ended.

11.1 Preparing Your Game for Connection

Before you can connect to your game, it must be prepared to receive a live update connection. The exact details of preparing a game for connection differ depending on the engine your game uses.

11.1.1 Initializing Live Update in the FMOD Unity Integration

When using the FMOD Unity integration, live update is automatically enabled by default. To check this, select "Edit Settings" from the "FMOD" menu in your Unity project.

By default, live update will be set to enabled for "Play in Editor" and disabled for built games. A text box underneath these settings will inform you what port is being used.

Starting your game or beginning in the "Play in Editor" mode will send information over the specified port.

11.1.2 Initializing Live Update in the FMOD for Unreal Engine Integration

When using the FMOD for Unreal Engine integration, live update is automatically enabled by default. To check this, select "Project Settings" from the "Edit" menu in your Unreal Engine project, and look in the "FMOD Studio" section in "Plugins".

Live update will be set to enabled for all non-final builds by default. You can specify a port number in the "Live Update Port" option under the "Advanced" settings.

Starting your game or beginning in the "Play in Editor" mode will send information over the specified port.

11.1.3 Initializing Live Update in Other Game Engines

When using the FMOD Studio API, you can enable live update by using FMOD_STUDIO_INIT_LIVEUPDATE when initializing the FMOD Studio system.

By default, FMOD Studio listens for connections on port 9264, however you can specify a different port using System::setAdvancedSettings.

FMOD Studio live update can only be used with the FMOD Studio API. If your game uses only the FMOD Core API, it will not be possible to connect to your game with live update.

11.2 Connecting to Your Game

Once your game is prepared for live update connection, you can connect FMOD Studio to it over a network.

To connect FMOD Studio to your game, select "Connect to Game..." in FMOD Studio's "File" menu. This opens the "Connect to Game" dialog, in which you can specify the IP address and port of a machine on which an instance of your game is running. This dialog accepts the following formats:

• localhost
• localhost:(port number)
• 127.0.0.1
• 127.0.0.1:(port number)

"localhost" indicates the machine on which FMOD Studio is running. If you do not specify a port, FMOD Studio defaults to port 9264.

If you specify an appropriate IP address and port and click the "Connect" button, a live update session begins.

During a live update session, the live update status indicator in the bottom-right corner of every FMOD Studio window is green and reads "Live Update ON". In addition, meters throughout FMOD Studio reflect the audio playing through your game instead of the events auditioning in FMOD Studio.