New Feature: Event-Based Packaging

In Unreal Integration 2019.2, asset management comes with some important changes, including a new workflow called Event-based Packaging. Manually importing Wwise Events into the Content Browser and managing references with manually created SoundBank Unreal assets is now a thing of the past.

This new workflow automatically creates all the needed assets for your project: Events, Auxiliary Busses, Media, Init Bank, RTPC (Game Parameters), Switch Value, State Value, Trigger and Acoustic Textures. When you build the sound data, each Event and Auxiliary Bus asset contains a sound bank with no media in it. Media assets are now wrapped into their own Unreal asset, and each event has a list of the media it needs. Loading SoundBanks by hand is no longer required; if an Event or Aux Bus is referenced in a map, the necessary SoundBank data and dependent media is automatically loaded into memory.

After using the Audiokinetic Launcher to integrate Wwise into your Unreal project, the new workflow is enabled by default, and all necessary changes are automatically made to the Wwise project. Connection to WAAPI is also enabled, as it dramatically improves sound data generation performance and enables extra functionality within the integration. For more information, please refer to Changes to your Wwise Project.

Note: In order to optimize the IO hook as much as possible in the context of the Event-Based Packaging workflow, MediaID (instead of file names) are displayed in the Loaded Media tab of the Advanced Profiler when connecting Wwise to the editor or game.

A project using an existing Wwise integration requires migrating the existing Unreal assets to the new workflow. For a large project, it is strongly recommended to perform this migration via the GenerateSoundBanks commandlet, using the -Migration switch, after updating the Wwise Unreal Integration from the Audiokinetic Launcher (see GenerateSoundBanks Commandlet for more information). Note that this migration is a time-consuming process. For smaller projects, the migration can be triggered when first opening the Unreal project in the Unreal Editor after updating the Wwise Unreal Integration from the Audiokinetic Launcher. A dialog asks whether using the new workflow is desired. Clicking Yes starts the migration process.

The migration process performs the following changes to your Unreal project:

• All necessary Unreal Assets to represent each Wwise object found in the Wwise project (Event, State, Switch, Trigger, Auxiliary Bus, and Acoustic Texture) are automatically created by default in the Content/WwiseAudio folder.
  • Existing assets that were created manually using previous Wwise Unreal Integration versions are consolidated to the newly created assets.
• Sound Data is generated.
  • SoundBanks are generated by Wwise, and are serialized in the corresponding Unreal assets.
  • Media files are wrapped in corresponding Wwise Media Unreal assets.
  • Dependencies between Events/Auxiliary Busses and Media are created.
  • If required, changes are submitted to Source Control.

If you decide to opt-out of Event-based Packaging, the following changes are made to your Unreal and Wwise project.

• It will create a InitBank asset that's only used to store the plugin list.
• Generate Metadata File, Generate XML Metadata, Generate JSON Metadata, Generate Per Bank Metadata File, Include GUID, Max Attenuation and Estimated Duration will be activated in your Wwise Project Settings.