UE4. Basic questions concearning soundbank updating and files needed to run sounds on another workstation.

Question

Hi. I have been reading the documentation (help, user's guide and UE4 integration help) but haven't been able to find any documentation on when I need to generate and update banks.

I have this issue when i have intergrated a ambientsound on the level using a AKAmbientsound, a lot of the times i get an error message saying "media file not available". When i finally got it to run (dont really know what i did to fix it), all the changes that i do from that point on are not applied, for example changing the length of the specified sound. Even when i change the sound bound to the event then update and generate, i first get the "media not available" for a few tries until the engine starts playing the old sound without interacting with the authoring tool. So my question is: when do i actually need to update and generate soundbanks and which changes to sound properties require me to regenerate/do something else that i have missed? 

On a related note, when i tried to see if the sound played correctly on my co-workers station, i was not able to run the sounds at all. So my question here is: which folder structures are essential to get ingame sounds to run (in UE4) without the authoring tool.

Using Perforce for source control. Win 8.1.

Thankful for some insight into this matter!

Answer 1

Basically, the workflow I would recommend is to do your iterations with Wwise connected to UE (so that any change you make is sent immediately to the UE Editor). Once you're satisfied with your work, save your project, and generate the SoundBanks from the UE Editor. This is what will make your changes "permanent".

As for sending content to another machine, the only thing needed is the SoundBanks. They are found in YOUR_GAME/content/WwiseAudio. If the .bnk files are present on your co-worker's machine, he should be able to hear sounds.

Comments

Okay, that makes sense, thank you!
I managed to solve the "sounds not updating locally" issue by omitting the cache files from source control or running the authoring tool as administrator (although that made me lose the ability to drag and drop to wwise).