Inbuilt mod support - allowing loose files and user-defined events to be loaded and played

Question

Hello. I've been studying Wwise for the past week or so and have decided it's a fantastic fit for a game I'm working on. We're fine with having to bake in our vanilla assets and events and use Wwise as intended, but we're trying to reach a market of modders that will not be so keen on working with Wwise projects.

We're thinking that all we need to give them is the ability to just define and play a sound and that's enough, so we're not too worried about modded states, switches, etc. However, looking at the SDK and API, we haven't found any clear-cut answer.

In essence, is it possible to programmatically create events and load and play loose files of audio through them at all? Would we have to autogenerate a sort of Mod.bnk with all this info every startup - is that even possible on a user's machine without Wwise installed?

We're looking into integrating Wwise into a custom C# engine, so we're not working with Unity, Unreal, etc. Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Take a look at Integrating External Sources chapter in SDK Documentation. You could create several template events with external source in Wwise -  each for different attenuation for example - then user in your editor or script would select event and sound file to be played for that event. You also would have to prepare WEM generation process in your editor since WAV files that user has picked in editor need to be converted into WEM.

Another option is to use Audio Input Source - in general on your code side this behaves like a sink that you have to feed with sound samples at runtime. You could load a Vorbis sound than before playback decompress it to PCM and feed Input Source with those PCM samples.