ABSTRACT
In any modern video game, there are innumerable objects in the world that either can or are currently making sound. Modern mixing techniques such as mixer snapshots, VCAs, and HDR mixing are valuable in taming the chaos, but they are unable to capture the nuance of a moment-to-moment mix. We present a mixing technique called Importance, where each object in the world gets an importance score based on some game-specific criteria. The objects are sorted by importance score and then assigned an importance bucket based on that score. Finally, the bucket applies an effect to the sound. Each sound may change buckets throughout its lifetime, so it is important to make it dynamic. Finally, we discuss debug display of the importance output.
