Audio not playing in Unreal without a Wwise install

Question

Tech info: Wwise 2022.1.0.8070, Unreal Engine 5.0.3, Windows 11

The problem in a nutshell: My team member has the generated soundbanks folder on their machine with the .bnk, .json and .wem files but my test event is not appearing in their content drawer.

The detail: I’ve integrated Wwise into the Unreal Project on my PC without any issues. I’ve created a simple test event (looping music track) and loaded into the map as an ambient sound, which works fine for me. I’ve then pushed my changes to the audio branch of our github repo and my team mate has downloaded these changes. My understanding is that all they should require is the contents of the Generated Soundbanks folder. When they open Unreal after pulling my changes, they do have the WwiseAudio folder in the Content Drawer, but the init bnk and the test event aren’t there. We can see these files in his generated Soundbanks folder, however, in the file explorer.

Required files to push:

• Whilst researching I have looked at Maximilien Poirer’s guide on source control https://youtu.be/ssFVuFCfldk
• The Wwise doc pages on source control https://www.audiokinetic.com/en/library/edge/?source=Help&id=using_wwise_with_source_control_system
• This blog post by Guillame Renaud https://blog.audiokinetic.com/en/version-control-a-wwise-project/
• This blog post about what’s new in Wwise 2022.1 https://blog.audiokinetic.com/en/wwise2022.1-whats-new/#integrations, where I got the info about the generated Soundbanks folder being the only thing now required by non Wwise users on the team.
• The Wwise Unreal integration docs https://www.audiokinetic.com/en/library/edge/?source=UE4&id=index.html

Are there any extra files/folders I need to include? Are there any extra steps required on the Unreal side of things to get Unreal to recognise these Wwise assets? Do they need the Wwise SDK? Do they need anything from the …Plugins/Wwise/ folder? For example I’ve noticed the Wwise sound engine files are there and wondered if they needed those.

A quick bit about me: I’m doing this for the first time, this is for a game jam and we’re doing this to learn more about this stuff as well as hopefully make a compelling portfolio piece to help get our first jobs in the games industry. My background is as a classically trained composer, I’ve learned basic C++ from following guides and tutorials online, but I’m still quite inexperienced. So apologies if I’m just making a silly mistake, but I’ve tried as hard as possible to find the solution myself before posting about it here.

Thanks so much for reading, if you have any answers or further resources you could point me to, to learn more about this stuff I’d be extremely grateful!