Wwise Help

Wwise uses Events to drive the sound, music, dialogue, and motion in-game. Events determine which sound, music, motion, or piece of dialogue is played at any particular point in the game. To accommodate as many situations as possible, there are two kinds of events:

“Action” Events contain one or more Actions that are applied to the different sound, music, or motion structures within your project hierarchy. The Actions you select will specify whether the Wwise objects will play, pause, stop, and so on. For example, the following Event could describe a point in a game where a character leaves a windswept field to enter an eerie cave.

	Note
	In most cases, a Play Event is paired with a Stop Action Event or even a Pause or Resume Event. As an alternative to creating separate Events for these types of Actions, you can use the Wwise SDK to execute these Actions on the sound. For more information, refer to Stopping, Pausing, and Resuming Sounds Programmatically.

Dialogue events, on the other hand, use a type of decision tree containing State Groups to dynamically determine what object is played. For more information about Dialogue Events, refer to Chapter 15, Managing Dynamic Dialogue.

After you create “action” Events in Wwise, they can be integrated into the game engine so that they are called at the appropriate times in the game. Since the game engine uses the Event name or ID, you can create the events, integrate them into the game and then build and fine-tune the contents of the Event without ever having to re-integrate it into the game again. As long as the Event name or ID does not change, no additional programming is required. This gives you a great deal of flexibility to experiment with different objects, add or remove some, and fine-tune transitions between them.

To help you easily identify an Event in the interface, it is represented by the following icon.

Icon	Represents
	Event

Using Events - Example

Let's say you are creating a fantasy role-playing game. You know that in one level of the game the character will enter a cave from the woods. You want the ambient sounds to change at the moment the character enters the cave. At the beginning of your project, you can create an Event in Wwise using temporary or placeholder sounds. The Event will contain a series of Actions that will stop the ambient “Woods” sounds and play the ambient “Cave” sounds. After the Event is created, it can be integrated into the game so that it will be triggered at the appropriate moment. Since no additional programming is required after the initial integration, you can experiment with different sounds, add and remove Actions, and change Action properties until it sounds just right.

The following illustration shows the relationship between the Action in-game, the Event, and the sounds that are played.