Mixing
What happens when several shakes play at once, how to stop a pile-up, and where Unreal's own shakes fit.
Several shakes can play at once, and they add up. Three settings on each shake asset keep that under control:
| Setting | What it does | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Single Instance | playing it again refreshes the one already running instead of starting a second | charge-ups and other looping shakes |
| Max Concurrent | a cap on copies of this shake; the oldest drops when it's reached | rapid fire, where twenty stacked kicks just read as a blur |
| Priority | a louder tier quietens the ones below it while it plays | an earthquake flattening the footstep rumble |
Priority ducking is off until you set Shake Duck Amount on the profile's mixer, and equal priorities never duck each other, so leaving everything at 0 keeps plain adding.
There's also a soft ceiling on everything shakes add together, so a genuine pile-up gets squeezed rather than running away. Below that ceiling, nothing is touched.
Unreal's own shakes#
Play Engine Shake plays a standard Unreal camera shake, so shakes from Sequencer or a marketplace pack keep working alongside Blendable's. The camera manager applies those itself, so they can't be mixed or capped with the rest, but the player's comfort setting still scales them on the way out.
When a shake does nothing#
The camera stack readout lists what's playing. Almost every "my shake did nothing" comes down to one of these:
- In 1.1, the effects component needs Output Via Camera Modifier ticked. See shakes.
- The player's comfort setting, or a Director's hush, has turned shakes down.
- Play World Shake returned 0 because the player was outside the outer radius.
- The shake is Single Instance and one was already playing, so your call refreshed it.
- Nothing on the actor implements the feedback interface, so the call was deliberately ignored.
Go deeperWhy the caps compare only copies of the same shake
Both concurrency rules are decided when the shake is asked for, and only ever against other copies of the same asset. Once two copies are adding together there's no way to tell them apart any more, and holding back a different shake would be a mixing decision, which belongs further down where the comfort scale and the ceiling already are.