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Overview

To effectively manage the audio and/or motion components of a game, Wwise puts all the audio and motion for your game into SoundBanks. A SoundBank is basically a file that contains the audio and/or motion data, media, or both. These SoundBanks are loaded into a game's platform memory at a particular point in the game. By loading only what is necessary, you can optimize the amount of memory that is being used for media by each platform. SoundBanks are the product of all your work and contain the final content that becomes part of your game.

In Wwise, there are two types of banks:

  • Initialization (Init) bank - A special bank that contains all the general information about a project, including information on the Bus hierarchy, and information on States, Switches, and RTPCs. If applicable, it also includes Audio Device ShareSets.

    The Initialization bank is automatically created every time Wwise generates the SoundBanks. The Initialization bank is usually loaded once at the beginning of your game so that all the general project information is easily accessible during game play. It must be the first bank loaded when starting a game; otherwise, the other banks (Content) may not load. Its filename is “Init.bnk”.

  • SoundBank - A file that contains a combination of Event data, sound, music, and motion structure data, and/or audio files. Unlike the Initialization bank, the SoundBanks are generally loaded and unloaded at different points in the game to better utilize platform memory usage.

Because all platforms are different, Wwise allows you to easily tailor the SoundBanks for each platform and generate the SoundBanks for all platforms simultaneously. Wwise also provides you with tools for troubleshooting any issues related to your SoundBanks to make sure that you are respecting the limitations of the different platforms.

You must use only one Wwise project per game. If you have several people working on a very large project, you can divide up a project into separate Work Units. For information on using Work Units, refer to Dividing Your Project into Work Units.


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