WWise Audio Support

[Breaking Fourth]

Has anybody made an attempt to integrate Slate with WWise Audio?

WWise is effectively a completely separate audio pipeline from Unity’s built-in audio, and works on a system of state machines and events. It probably wouldn’t be hard to put events into Slate to trigger WWise state transitions or one-shot actions, but has anybody attempted to add support for scrubbing the timeline and creating clips with waveforms?

[Gavalakis]

Hey,
I have not personally attempted it, but you could use the existing functions Slate provides for drawing the waveform from an AudioClip in the GUI (EditorTools.DrawLoopedAudioTexture), as well as probably using the (AudioSampler.Sample) for previewing the audio while scrubbing.
I’d actually recommend you take a look at the existing PlayAudio.cs action clip, which makes use of the above functions as an example 🙂
If you do try to integrate WWise Audio and you need any help down the road, just let me know!

Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/97q2Rjh

[tt_rage]

Hey all,

We’re currently attempting the same thing with our latest project.

Like Breaking Fourth mentioned, adding a WWise track and action clip to Slate proved to be pretty straightforward. However, getting WWise to support scrubbing in the Slate Editor is proving a little more involved.

We’re sidestepping the waveform and clip lozenge size issues at the moment – mainly because Wwise clip data is gathered and returned via a callback that requires an initialised-and-running AKSoundEngine, which doesn’t seem easy to do when not in runtime.

Instead, we’re looking at the scrubbing issue. Again, the problem seems to be kicking off the AkSoundEngine when in Slate preview mode to allow the Wwise clips to be compiled and then played.

Has anyone else made any progress with this?

[Breaking Fourth]

Hi tt_rage,

We’ve hit upon the same issue, and unfortunately as far as we can see, there is no way to trigger Wwise to initialise outside of Play mode. This is a known issue and Wwise are considering adding support for this in the future, but nothing is confirmed, so no ETA.

https://www.audiokinetic.com/qa/1630/listening-to-wwise-sounds-in-the-unity-editor

[tt_rage]

Hi Breaking Fourth (great name, btw)

Thanks for the rapid response and the link to the AK forums. That reply dates back to 2015, so I’ll give them a poke and see if they have any further (and hopefully more concrete) plans to take a look at the issue.

At the moment we have two possible alternate solutions:

1) duplicate Unity-audio-compatible assets paired to each Wwise event. The WWise track/clip in Slate plays the Unity-audio when in Editor, and calls the WWise events when in Play mode. The duplicate assets are excluded when packaging up the final build. Unfortunately, we have a lot of dialogue and sfx and we invariably eat up a lot more storage space this way, but we do get full functionality in Slate. But it’s not an ideal solution.

2) custom meta-data for each wwise event created by a post-process step between Wwise tool export and Unity import. The meta data contains all info we need on the clip for Slate editor integration. With this, we get the correctly-sized clip lozenge and we can use the data in gameobject configuration while in editor and we save some disk space, but we don’t get playback in Slate preview mode. Which again isn’t ideal.

We’ll see where we get with this.

Thanks again for the quick response, and we’ll keep you posted if we have a breakthrough.

t.

[Breaking Fourth]

Just to provide an update, we’ve come up with a rudimentary solution to give us an audio preview in the editor that we can scrub through.

Our plan is to keep both Unity and Wwise audio systems enabled. Periodically, we’ll run an automated process where we play through our cutscenes in Play mode while Wwise captures the audio out to a file. We’ll then import that file back into Unity and add it to the Director audio track. We should then be able to scrub through the timeline and get a basic idea of how things sounded at the last export without having to enter play mode, and we’ll have a companion script to disable that track whenever we do enter play mode.

It’s hacky, but it should make the Wwise approach just a little more workable.

[Gavalakis]

Thanks for the follow up and sharing your solution on using Wwise in your project.

Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/97q2Rjh

[Author]

Posts