Sounds can be grouped in different ways.
For example:

• System sound, highest priority, small limits
• Background music, high priority, small limits
• Sound effect, normal priority, medium limits
• Ambient sound, low priority, medium limits
• Voice, high priority, small limits

It is useful to use Categories in ADX to implement these groups.

Limiting the Voice by Category

You can limit the number of Voices using the Cue limit of the Category.

Prioritizing by Category

You can roughly prioritize the Category by adding an AISAC, configuring the Voice priority and enabling the AISAC initial value.

Subdividing a Category

You may want to divide the Categories for a more granular control of groups.

You can create Category Groups and assign multiple Categories to a single Cue.

Impact of Categories

Categories create rules which can affect an entire game.
You can create a rule so that the limits should not be exceeded irrespective of which Player is being played back.

By using this feature, you can:

• Adjust the volume of a whole group of sounds.
• Stop, pause, resume the playback of a whole group of sounds.
• Control the bus send level of a whole group of sounds at once using an AISAC on a Category.
  You can make some features such as Category Cue limit as a local rule instead of a game's global rule.
  (for example, defining a sound limiting behavior when the same battle character is selected). For more information, refer to the sound object.
  

Category Output File

Categories are global settings and the corresponding information is therefore stored in the ACF file when generating the binary files for the game.

Cues are assigned to the Categories created in the global settings. Since the information about the Cue is stored in the ACB file, the ACB depends on the information contained in the ACF when using Categories. Therefore, if you edited the Categories, be sure to generate both ACF and ACB files.

A Cue can belong to multiple Categories, for example sound effect and character voice.

In the case of hierarchical Cues using a CueLink, each Cue is affected by the Category it belongs too, but if the linked Cue does not belong to any Category, it is affected by the Category of the referencing Cue.

Category Volume

Changing a Category's volume affects the volume of all the Cues belonging to that Category.

Number of pronunciation limit in category

It is able to limit the number of cue playbacks by category.

Multiple playback prohibition time in category

It is able to limit the multiple playback prohibition time.