Megacity

"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). Mixing pipeline

The team

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.