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The Wwise Sound Engine

Using Wwise, you can build astonishing sound, music, and motion structures and package them into SoundBanks, but you also need a powerful and reliable sound engine to deliver the sound and motion you designed. At a very basic level, the Wwise sound engine manages and processes all aspects of the audio and motion within your game in real time. It was designed to be easily integrated into your game development pipeline for inclusion in the final game.

Normally, these integration and processing tasks require significant amounts of programming, but the Wwise sound engine dynamically creates the processing pipeline, leaving developers free to customize the engine in order to fit the specific needs of any game on any supported platform.

Through its sophisticated behavior and tight integration with the Wwise authoring application, the sound engine is also able to perform the following functions:

Handles common playback behaviors, including random and sequential play, which are created and defined in the authoring application by the sound designer.
Handles fades and cross fades out-of-the-box that are created and fine-tuned in the authoring application by the sound designer.
Manages the priority of sound and motion objects using playback limits, specific priority settings, and virtual voices all set by the sound designer in the authoring application.
Supports an unlimited number of environments out-of-the-box through a simple API. In addition, because the sound engine creates and destroys the environmental routing dynamically, it ensures a consistent experience on all platforms and reduces the memory footprint and CPU workload.
Supports the naturally occurring conditions of obstruction and occlusion when the source is partially or completely blocked by elements within a game.
Supports an unlimited number of different listeners in the game.
Contains debugging instrumentation code that is exposed visually in real time in the authoring application. As a result, the sound designer can analyze the profiling output and take proper action in real time while the game is running.

For more information about the capabilities of the Wwise sound engine, refer to the Wwise SDK documentation.

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