Question by MrWilly97 · Feb 17, 2020 at 03:56 PM · 3d sound games sound effects sound-overlapping

How to prevent sound effects playing every frame?

I am making a horror game in a team of people at university and I am handling all of the audio for the game.

To do this, I store the audio clips in a dictionary and I instantiate a prefab game object with an AudioSource each time a sound effect is played to play that sound effect.

I am having problems where multiple prefabs of the same sound effect is being created (because they are being tested and created in update)

To try solve this I tried creating the following function to test if there is already a game object with the same AudioSource clip in the scene, and if there is, don't play anything. To do this test I first add the name of the audio clip to each prefab instance and test this against the sound effect being tested. This is how I spawn each instance:

     public void PlaySFX(SFX sfx)
     {
         //creates instance of sfx prefab and gets the audio source component
         AudioSource sfxAudio = Instantiate(SFXPrefab).GetComponent<AudioSource>();
 
         //Add audio clip name to the end of each instance (used to test later)
         sfxAudio.gameObject.name = sfxAudio.gameObject.name + "_" + SFX_Dictionary[sfx].name;
 
         //Plays sfx once
         sfxAudio.PlayOneShot(SFX_Dictionary[sfx]);
 
         //Destroy instance once sfx has been played 
         Destroy(sfxAudio.gameObject, SFX_Dictionary[sfx].length);
     }

This is how I test for an existing SFX playing:

     public bool CanPlaySound(SFX sfx)
     {
         //array of gameobjects with "SFX" tag
         var audioSources = GameObject.FindGameObjectsWithTag("SFX");
         bool isAlreadyPlaying = false;
 
         //string of the clip name being tested
         string clipName = SFX_Dictionary[sfx].name;
 
         //loops through the array and sets AlreadyPlaying to true if there is 
         //a gameobject that contains the name of the sfx
         for (int i = 0; i < audioSources.Length - 1; i++)
         {
             string asName = audioSources[i].GetComponent<AudioSource>().clip.name;
 
             if (asName.Contains(clipName))
             {
                 isAlreadyPlaying = true;
             }
         }
         if (isAlreadyPlaying)
         {
             return false;
         } else
         {
             return true;
         }
     }

I am however receiving an error to do with the audio clip name and the function isn't working correctly.

I was wondering if someone could help me with this problem?

or suggest a better way to stop sound effects playing every frame?

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