Table of Contents
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Summary
With smaller Wwise projects, having just one SoundBank is usually fine. But, once your project starts to scale up in size, the memory usage of the SoundBank might become problematic with what’s available. As such, your audio content will have to be split into parts, where you only load exactly what you need. We achieve that by understanding the game mechanics and how content is loaded, which is generally key to appropriately separating the audio content into a series of smaller SoundBanks.
Let’s navigate to the SoundBank Manager and discuss how WAG separates audio content into SoundBanks.
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From the Layouts menu, select SoundBank.
In the SoundBank Manager, you’ll see a list of the SoundBanks currently in WAG. In the SoundBanks list column you’ll see four Work Units and one All_In_One SoundBank. Each Work Unit describes a different approach to separating your audio content.
![[Note]](/images/wwise251/?source=wwise251&id=note.png) | |
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The images below show all SoundBanks in the WAG Wwise project, including the ones that you’ll be asked to create in this lesson. |
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All_In_One: This SoundBank contains each and every Event in the Wwise project. This is a temporary SoundBank, used only for this certification and developing WAG. Many studios begin their development with this approach, as it’s often difficult to separate the audio content before the game starts taking shape.
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General: While some elements can be loaded and unloaded, there’ll often be sounds you always use or need to have constantly loaded (thus the color
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Within this Work Unit you’ll find the General SoundBank, which contains all Events that can’t be placed in either a Region or Context SoundBank. This could be music or player sounds, which have to be loaded constantly because they can be played at any given moment.
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Region: This Work Unit contains a SoundBank for each region (thus the color
) in WAG.
For example, the WAG Unity project is separated into many scenes, each containing their separate SoundBank and related audio scripts. When a player is within a certain region, the SoundBank of that region will be loaded. Similarly, when the player exits that region, its SoundBank will be unloaded to free up memory space.
In the above image, you see the Region Triggers visualized as transparent shapes in the WAG Unity Project's Main Scene. Each of these transparent shapes define a region of where a SoundBank should be loaded. As such, when the Player enters a region, the corresponding Soundbank will be loaded. These Region Triggers won’t be visible in game.
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Context: This Work Unit contains all the SoundBanks that are loaded in a certain context (thus the color
).
For example, the Quest SoundBanks are loaded according to the quest you’re currently in. When progressing to Quest 6, the Quest_05 SoundBank will be unloaded and the Quest_06 SoundBank will be loaded. The same applies for the 'DLC' Work Unit, that are only loaded once completing certain requirements.
This SoundBank structure is one that makes sense for WAG, but other game developments may structure their project differently.