Unreal Engine 5 | Cooking | .wproj became mandatory?

Question

Version 2019.2.2.727 - did not produce cooking errors when the .wproj was not found
Version 2021.1.10.7883.2350 - started producing the following cooking errors:

`LogWwiseProjectParser: Error: Could not read the Wwise project file`

Looking at the source code, specifically in WwiseProjectInfo.cpp, WwiseProjectInfo::Parse()

Previously the
errorMessage produced by ParseXmlFile() was ignored,

now
UE_LOG(LogWwiseProjectParser, Error, TEXT("Could not read the Wwise project file '<%s>'."), *ProjectPath);
is produced, marking the cooking process as failure

My question, I guess, is whether .wproj dependency became mandatory

Answer 1

If you are doing additional operations such as generating Wwise Sound Data or synchronizing Wwise assets when building/cooking your game, it would be advisable to have the Wwise project accessible. However for simply cooking Unreal assets it should not be necessary. Unfortunately, this error message seems to be making it necessary, so you have two options : add the Wwise project to your cook machine, or manually edit the UE_LOG line you've identified to de-escalate the log level (e.g. to "Warning" or "Log"). I've created an issue in our bug-tracking system so we can fix this internally for future releases (we will likely set it to the "Warning" level).