Looping automatic weapon system with Unreal and Wwise

Question

Hi, I'm currently working as a sound designer for a competitive FPS. We have a need to integrate a looping weapon system (looping done within a random container of oneshot layers that gets a start event and has an end event for switchable tails) for the automatic weapons that have a stable, unjittery output off gunsounds. Doing the gunfire with single events per gunshot from Unreal results in a jittery firerate and double sounds being triggered now and then, but one shot drawn from mag, when tapping the mouse. Since this is an online server client game we also have the need for everything being synchronized across players and also the need for the gunfires to be visually synced for the local players own firing.

Our systems programmers are worried that we want to have something looping outside of Unreal (since what we're doing now is having Unreal send out a start event and a stop event, and has no idea what is going on in Wwise during the time the sound is looping). I know this is a common practice, having looping done in Wwise due to stability in timing, in a lot of games with weapons that have higher firerates that gets jittery due to the framerate dependency in doing it on a per shot basis, but I have a very hard time finding any proper references to how it should be done properly. An example of a stable system would be the firing system in Borderlands 3 mentioned in earlier blog posts which I know uses some kind of MIDI-triggering.

All forms off tips and tricks on how one could solve this kind off problem is welcome and sorry for a bit off a confusing problem description, just holler if I need to clear anything up!