How to properly prepare and load an audiobank file?

[RageLeague]

Now I am trying to figure out how to properly prepare and load audiobank files. I have already downloaded fmod studio and made a sample fmod project, like this:

(This is for a custom character theme music, but that's besides the point as I can't even load the bank file.)

After building the project, I got two files, Master.bank and Master.strings.bank

I put the two files somewhere in my mod folder and tried to load them using AUDIO:LoadBank, but only the Master.strings.bank is ever loaded to the game while Master.bank always fail to load. The error message is "failed to load DEMOCRATICRACE:assets/audio/Master.bank". I know that Master.strings.bank successfully loaded because I did DBG(AUDIO.sound_banks) and got this:

I tried both synchronous loading and async loading, and they both failed. So I'm wondering, is there anything special I need to do with the project before it is compatible with the game? The post above said something about "requiring a project file compatible with the game to build new banks", but I'm not sure what that means exactly. As long as the audiobank is loaded into lua, I can probably figure it out from there, but I'm not sure how to get there first.

[rooks]

I attempted a similar thing as you a while ago, and the FMOD documentation along with this thread seems to indicate the project needs to be set up a particular way to be compatible with the main bank.  Unfortunately I got pulled onto other tasks and wasn't able to follow up, but if you come across any solutions it'd be great to know.

 

[RageLeague]

From the post listed above:

Quote

Often easiest way to achieve this is to make a copy of your project, strip out all the events, and then give that skeletal project to your players for them to create new events in.

That sounds like a good idea. Bank files can't be reverse engineered back to the original project file, so in order to have the structure be similar to the original bank file, I need at least a basic structure of the original project file.

Also, how is "engine.sound:LoadBank" implemented? Is it a function written by Klei or is it just calling part of FMOD's api? Right now, this function returns nil if a bank fails to load, regardless of reason, so I'm wondering if it can somehow give out a more detailed error message for debugging?

[RageLeague]

Looking at the log file(instead of debug console using ctrl+~), the error is something like this:

Quote

15:52.36-General: FMOD error! (28) An error occurred that wasn't supposed to.  Contact support.

When I am trying to load the main bank file. The string file worked fine. Not sure what happened here.

After some investigation, apparently fmod studio doesn't allow loading of multiple projects.

https://qa.fmod.com/t/loading-multiple-banks/15185

Which a solution is linked here:

https://fmod.com/resources/documentation-studio?version=2.0&page=supporting-downloadable-and-user-generated-content.html

Either way, it seems that you need to provide a copy of the project, or a packaged copy if you don't want the player to edit specific contents.