Editing Effects
Effects were added in an update on December 12, 2022.
With an effects panel, you can enable special audio effects like reverb, delay, distortion, and more. Game Maker has official docs on their audio effects which you can see here!
In the Bard audio editor, effects can be attached to containers or to busses. When attached to a container, those effects will apply to just that sound event whenever it's triggered. But when they're attached to a bus, they'll apply to every sound that plays through that bus and its children, too. For example, you could create a special reverb/echo effect for when the player is inside caves, and if that effect is attached to the sound effects bus, then when it's enabled all the game sounds would have that echo applied in real time. Pretty neat, right?!?!
You can edit the effect parameters with visual sliders in the editor, but you can also attach parameters to them to make them automatically update based on the game state.
Open this panel from a container or a bus, and it will display a list of every effect attached to that object. Each effect is represented on its own row in this panel. For each effect, from left to right:
- ON button: Use this to turn the effect on or off. This on-or-off state is purely for testing/listening purposes in the editor, and doesn't change its ingame behavior at all.
- Name (text field): Edit the name of the effect here. This name can be used by a programmer to enable or disable the effect while the game is running. You can give the same name to multiple effects! If you do this, then all the effects which share a name can be conveniently enabled or disabled a the same time with code, allowing you to create groups of effects which always apply together.
- EDIT button: This opens an effect sub-panel which lets you adjust the individual parameters of the effect.
- DEL button: Press this to remove the effect. At the bottom of the panel is the NEW EFFECT button which lets you add a new effect to this object.
When you EDIT an effect, this is the panel that comes up. You can adjust these sliders to change how the effect sounds. Each type of effect has different parameters. You can learn about them just by listening and playing with the sliders, but if you want to know more about them, check out the GameMaker docs on them.
If you open the PARAMS tab and drag and drop a parameter onto the text field for an effect parameter, you'll create a connection between the two - this allows you to create custom behavior for the effect which automatically updates when the audio parameter updates.
You can learn more about this graph editor here.
This feature is quite powerful and can be used to hand-craft how effects are applied. You can attach the same audio parameter to multiple effects and effect parameters, so that multiple things are driven by one parameter.
For example, you might want to add a slo-mo effect to your game; when slo-mo is active, maybe you want music to get quieter, but also echo a bit and have a low-pass filter on it. You could add a gain, LPF and reverb effect to your music, then have the "mix" of all 3 effects attached to an audio parameter called "slo-mo." The programmer would simply need to set the value of "slo-mo", and the background music would automatically take on all of the above effects automatically.