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RTPC Tips & Best Practices

Before using RTPCs, you may want to review the following sections, which provide you with a series of tips and best practices that can help you get the most of your sound and motion in game.

[Note] Note

The RTPC cursors for LFO and Envelope modulators do not tell you their specific values at any point in time since they are determined by the modulator's internal properties.

RTPC Naming

Before changing the name of a Game Parameter, be sure to check how your programmer integrated it into the game engine. If it was integrated using the Game Parameter's name, you should try to avoid changing it in Wwise as it will require additional work for your programmer.

Performance

Although RTPCs can be created for all objects, busses, Effect and Attenuation instances, Switch Groups, and blend tracks within your project, it is important to use them selectively as they can consume a significant amount of the platform's memory and CPU.

Valid Ranges for Smart Pitch Curves

Smart pitch curves tend to give good results around their native value, but will not necessarily sound good around extreme values. For example, an engine sound recorded at 2,000 RPM will sound perfect at 2,000 RPM, and probably quite good in the range from 500 to 3,500 RPM. Beyond that, however, it might not sound natural. One way to remedy this situation is to use multiple recordings at various native values, then assemble the recordings in a Blend Container. For more information about Blend Containers, refer to Defining the Contents and Behavior of the Blend Container.

Creating Doppler Type Effects Using RTPCs

The pitch property used in the Wwise Sound Engine pipeline has been highly optimized for resampling, allowing for playback to be sped up or slowed down in real time. The “best-practice” approach for creating Doppler type effects in Wwise is to have the game engine keep track of the position delta between the listener and the sound source, which basically equates to a speed value. This 'speed' Game Parameter can then be mapped to the pitch property of a sound using an RTPC. As the listener and sound move closer or farther away from each other in game, the sound will be pitched up or down. This is by far the least CPU intensive procedure for creating Doppler effects.

When multiple listeners (including split screen) are used in Wwise, Doppler effects using pitch require special design considerations. In real life, the sound may result in a different pitch value for each listener based on the velocity and distance between the object and each listener. Since game objects in Wwise use a single instance for each playing sound, having two unique pitch values for a single sound is not possible. Therefore, a single pitch value needs to be determined programmatically.


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