Creating a Sound Cue for UDK

Creating a Sound Cue for UDK is a particularly handy skill to have in your arsenal when building a living game-world. A sound cue allows you a bundle multiple sounds and effects into one file. This makes it easier to add sound to your level without having a billion sound files everywhere.

To create a sound cue, you need to start in the UDK asset window. Make sure nothing is selected, and right click in the asset window. You'll see a list of options appear. From this list you want to select new sound cue. When you select this, you'll see that a window pops up. This is the sound cue editor. This is where you'll be adding all the sounds and effects to the sound cue. At it's current state, it's pretty useless, because you need to add sound into it. To do this simply go to the asset browser and click on a sound, so that is highlighted. Then, switch back to the sound cue editor and right click, and you'll see the option too add the sound. Once this is done, the sound cue editor should look like this. It's important to note that you can add multiple sounds in by repeating this process.

Now, the sound cue will not play any sound in this state. This is because the nodes are not connected. to connect the nodes, simply click on the black box by the speaker and drag a line to the other black box. When you release they'll be connected. To test this, once connected simply click the furthest button to the right on the top bar of the screen.

Now, that the basics of a sound cue has been covered, it's time to add in a little more complexity. To add other effects, you simply right click anywhere in the sound cue, and it'll bring up a list of effects. If you click one of these effects, you should notice a new node appears denoting to that effect. Again, you will need to join this up for it to have any effect. 

 If you want to edit an effect, you simply click that effect, and in the bottom window, an attributes box opens. The attribues tend to vary depending on the effect selected. Once you have finished editing, you simply just exit the sound cue editor, and you'll notice that in the asset window, you'll have a new sound cue.