Megacity
- Unity landing page for Megacity
- Indepth walkthrough and documentation of audio systems developed for Megacity
- Download link for the project source and assets (7+ GB)
"Megacity" is a tech demo developed in house at Unity intended to showcase streaming and LOD handling of a very large, detailed urban environment. This page contains a brief overview of the technology we developed in the audio R&D department allowing the demo to render 100k+ 3D audio emitters.
Contents
This is a visual overview of the demo, not a good representation of the audio - see features.
What we did: ECS and DSPGraph
Our task was to soundify an entire urban landscape. A couple of approximating approaches are possible here, notably volumetric sounds or just flat out prerendered stereo soundscapes.
Nothing new about that though! Since the name of game was scale, we wanted to implement a very detailed and interactive sound experience. Approximating the static and moving
geometry together with map reduction and parallel mixing made it possible to actually simulate a really large amount of emitters that would mesh into a sound-scapish
volumetric sound as distance increases (termed sound fields).
The team
- Alexy Yakovenko: Music system and player car system
- Dominique Leroux: DSPGraph back end, sample playback backend
- Harini Rajagopal: Testing and QA
- Jan Marguc: Environmental sound fields, asset workflows and documentation
- Janus Thorborg: Traffic sound fields and flybys
- Wayne Johnson: DSPGraph and presentations
Note that the sound design and composition was entirely outsourced, while we did the implementation.
Demos of audio features
I recommend watching the entirety of this talk presented by our team lead Wayne, but I've highlighted some demos of the features we did below.
- (35:14) Per-emitter 3D spatialization with conical propagation patterns
- (36:06) Isolated city block sound fields and point sources
- (40:24) Isolated traffic sound fields
- (40:40) Fly-by car effects
- (43:23) Vertical music mixing system
- (45:30) Interactive player car sounds