Transitions are the key to making interactive music listenable. Without smooth transitions, the illusion of a game score being one constantly-shifting piece of music is lost. Individual Music Segments fitted together badly are jarring for the listener and break the realism of your game. To avoid these problems, Wwise allows you to customize the transitions between music objects and make them as seamless as possible.
A transition is meant to be a smooth bridge between a source and destination segment, and Wwise provides you with tools to refine these bridges. You can define transitions between individual segments, or between containers holding segments. In this way, you can avoid discordant and sudden changes between musical passages.
Imagine you are making a block puzzle game. At any given time, your players experience one of two situations: the game is going well (blocks are being cleared rapidly) or the game is going badly (blocks are piling up). Naturally, you've had some cool music composed to reflect each of these situations, which you want to show off to its fullest. One way to do this is to make sure the transitions between these two sets of music sound natural and musical.
To meet the needs of your game, you could create a Music Switch Container called Puzzle Sounds, with two Music Playlist Containers, Calm and Panic. These containers would be linked to two game states, reflecting the in-game situations. Successful transitions between these two Playlist Containers would make the game's score compelling. The following illustration shows how these transitions could be implemented in game:
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In this case, the transitions between the Playlist Containers have been smoothed by the use of fade-in and fade-out curves. This makes the change from one container to another more gradual and natural, and avoids noisy artifacts.
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