Certification home page Purchase Exam

Lesson 3

Table of Contents

Playback Limiting and Virtual Voice

The Evil Head is an enemy that is designed to be swarming, aggravating, and hasty, so wherever the adventurer goes, they will try to follow. As such, you can easily have numerous Evil Heads in your trail trying to bite you in turn. Let’s jump into Unity and get a sense of the situation.

  1. In the WAG Unity Project, from the Unity menu, go to Audiokinetic > Certification > 251 > Lesson 3 and select Mass Evil Head.

  2. In the WAG Unity Project, click Play.

    You start in the Cave, but let’s also prevent the Adventurer from dying when attacked by Evil Heads.

  3. Press ESC, enable GOD MODE and exit the menu.

  4. Let as many Evil Heads follow you as possible.

  5. Press ESC to enter the WAG menu and click Play to exit play mode.

As you might have noticed, the soundscape is completely cluttered with Evil Head sounds. When inside the range of the Adventurer, Evil Heads will charge for a short distance, followed by a bite. Let’s try to limit the Evil Head charge sounds to the three most relevant enemies, which are the ones who are the closest, as they would have the highest chance of a successful bite.

  1. In Wwise's Project Explorer, expand Actor-Mixer Hierarchy > Default Work Unit > World > Enemies > Enemies > Enemies_EvilHead > EvilHead and select the EvilHead_Attack_Charge Random Container.

  2. In the Advanced Settings tab, go to the Playback Limit group box, enable the Limit sound instances to: check box, and set a global limit of 3.

    To control which of the Evil Heads Wwise should prioritize, we’ll also change a few priority settings. The charge is super important to hear, as this indicates a harmful attack in close proximity. Secondly, the priority needs to scale by distance so that Wwise knows it’s the closest Evil Head we’re interested in hearing.

  3. Select Override parent and set the Priority to 80.

    If you take a look at the priority table, notice that there is a difference between enemy non-harmful sounds and harmful sounds.

  4. Set Offset priority by to -20, so if the sounds are on max attenuation they will have the same priority as non-harmful enemy sounds.

    Let’s now try this out in WAG and look at how the Profiler prioritizes the Evil Head changes. For this demonstration, a special scene has been constructed with a Cave packed with Evil Heads.

  5. From the Wwise Layouts menu, select Profiler.

  6. In the Wwise toolbar, click the Remote… button, then in the Remote Connections window, select the Wwise Adventure Game (Editor) and click Connect.

  7. In Unity, click Play.

  8. Press ESC, enable GOD MODE and exit the menu.

  9. Let as many Evil Heads attack you as possible, without killing them.

  10. Click Play to exit play mode.

    Let’s now monitor the Evil Head Charge voice instances, while filtering out all other voice information.

  11. In the Profiler layout, go to the Advanced Profiler’s Voices tab and click the browse (...) button, go to Actor-Mixer Hierarchy > Default Work Unit > World > Enemies > Enemies > Enemies_EvilHead > EvilHead, then select the EvilHead_Attack_Charge Random Container from the Project Explorer - Browser.

  12. Click OK.

  13. In the Profiler layout’s Performance Monitor view, drag the time cursor to a place where at least four EvilHead_Attack_Charges are active simultaneously.

Notice that no more than three Evil Heads are set to physical, whereas the remainder are set to virtual and over limit.

[Tip]

One alternative to using Offset priority is to use either an RTPC or a State. As such, you can define a non-linear priority change, like designing a logarithmic curve using the Built-In Parameter Distance_to_Player. Visit the final WAG Wwise project, and in the Project Explorer go to Actor-Mixer Hierarchy > Default Work Unit > World > Enemies > Enemies > Enemies_EvilCrawler > EvilCrawler Actor-Mixer to see such an example.

Was this page helpful?

Previous Next