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Building Interactive Music Hierarchies Tips & Best Practices

Interactive music is a complex tool with many options. Adopting a coherent strategy for building your Interactive Music Hierarchy at the beginning of a project can save you time and effort later on. Of course, there are multiple ways to approach any interactive music project, and you can use Wwise in any way you see fit to create the best results for your game. The following are suggestions for how you can group objects to get the most from your interactive music.

Grouping objects in the Interactive Music Hierarchy

Before you start building your music hierarchy you need to think about the best way to organize your objects to save authoring time, but also to manage your project's memory consumption.

To optimize memory usage, consider applying properties at a higher level in the hierarchy so that they can be shared by the entire group. The following properties can be shared:

  • Positioning

  • RTPCs

  • States

  • Randomizers

Using Multiple Levels of Music Switch Containers

It is preferable to minimize the hierarchy of cascading Music Switch Containers. As much as possible, descendant Music Switch Containers should be self-contained making parent Music Switch Containers responsible for transitioning between distinct descendants and not between the internals of any individual descendant.

Since a Music Switch Container can be bound to multiple State Groups or Switch Groups, a single high level Music Switch Container can be setup to provide all of the logic for transitioning between its children. In cases where a Music Switch Container has Music Switch Container descendants, it is preferable to isolate State and Switch Groups to specific Music Switch Containers and not manage individual State and Switch changes from multiple levels of the hierarchy.

Be aware that by using multiple levels of Switch Containers, you introduce a situation where you are incapable of specifying an order of importance for all transitions, because they are defined in multiple distinct sets, each with a catch-all rule, and no relationship of priority exists between parent-child music switch transition rules. Consequently, if there are competing transition rules, it may be difficult to track the active music transition. For more information about transitions, refer to Understanding Transitions.


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