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Introducing Wwise

Based on a profound understanding of the needs of both sound designers and audio programmers, Audiokinetic has created Wwise, an innovative solution dedicated to the art of audio design. Several years in the making, Wwise has been developed with the following premises in mind:

  • Providing a complete authoring solution.

  • Redefining the production workflow for audio and motion.

  • Improving pipeline efficiency.

  • Pushing the boundaries of gameplay immersion using audio and motion.

This powerful and comprehensive audio pipeline solution consists of the following:

  • A powerful authoring application—a non-linear authoring tool for creating audio and motion asset structures, defining propagation, managing sound, music, and motion integration, profiling playback, and creating SoundBanks.

  • An innovative sound engine—a sophisticated sound engine that manages audio and motion processing, performs a comprehensive set of diverse functions, and is highly optimized for each platform.

  • A game simulator—a LUA script interpreter that reproduces exactly how sounds and motion will behave in the game, allowing you to validate specific behaviors and profile the performance of Wwise on each platform before the integration of Wwise into your game's sound engine.

  • A plug-in architecture—a completely scalable plug-in architecture for quickly expanding the audio immersion in the game. Several plug-ins are available, including:

    • Source plug-ins for generating audio and motion, such as a tone generator.

    • Effect plug-ins for creating audio effects, such as a reverb.

  • An interface between Wwise and world builders (Wwise Authoring API)—a unique plug-in interface with external game world builders or 3D applications that enables external applications to seamlessly communicate with Wwise. From the Wwise Authoring API, you can easily modify everything that can normally be modified using the Sound Engine API.

The Wwise Production Pipeline

At the foundation of Wwise is the production pipeline—a new and innovative way to work that tightly integrates the necessary tools allowing you to perform a variety of tasks in real time within the game itself.

  • Author—build sound, motion, and music structures and define properties and behaviors.

  • Simulate—validate artistic direction and simulate game play.

  • Integrate—integrate early without additional programming.

  • Mix—mix properties in game in real time.

  • Profile—profile in real time to ensure game constraint compliance.

The Wwise Project

Wwise is a project-based system, which means that all the audio and motion information related to a particular game for each and every platform will be in one project.

Within this project, you can do any and all of the following:

  • Manage the sound, voice, music, and motion assets in your game.

  • Define object properties and playback behaviors.

  • Create Events, both Action and Dialogue Events, that trigger audio and motion in game.

  • Create prototypes and simulations.

  • Troubleshoot and profile all aspects of the audio and motion in your project.

Projects also contain the SoundBanks that are generated for each platform and language version that you are creating for your game.


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