With the Wwise-101 and Wwise-201 certifications, you learnt how to build fantastic interactive audio and music content. You hooked up every property you could think of to RTPCs and States, you created sophisticated effects, you set mixing rules to ensure focus and clarity, and you added all sorts of variations to eliminate repetitions.  Perhaps, you approached the development of your first game with the same principles and approaches you learned, and the result was a terrifically sounding game!  You certainly should be proud of yourself!

Back to Reality

However, just as you began to feel that creating audio for games is not as difficult as people have warned you that it would be, one morning, the lead programmer on your project knocked at your door with that look in his eyes. Instantly, like waking up from a dream, reality kicked in. You realize that you are using many times more memory and CPU resources than allocated to audio, and you are going to have to make serious improvements quickly before someone else simply jumps into the project and sabotages your masterpiece so that audio fits into its allocated budget.

Introducing the Wwise-251 Certification: Performance Optimizations and Mobile Considerations! 

Just like in classic comic novels, the Wwise-251 certification course arrives to the rescue at the final moment to equip you with the right tools and knowledge to save the day and ship the best sounding game ever using a fraction of the resources it was initially using.  And, on that day, you became the superhero of the studio!

"Optimization is about identifying the reasons behind your performance issues, and understanding what modifications can be applicable to solve them. This is exactly what you'll learn in the cert-251," says Mads Maretty Sønderup, who's behind the creation of the course material. "Additionally, with a few tips and good practices, almost any Wwise project can become mobile ready without compromising the diverse soundscape on platforms that can handle it. " 

As a playground for this certification, you’ll use the Wwise Adventure Game, an open-source Unity project you’ll be asked to optimize to certain standards. The game runs on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. "We're not only presenting theoretical exercises, the certification offers a complete game project. We'll throw you into a full-fledged Wwise and Unity project for some practical experience. You will be invited to dive into every corner of the game and directed to modify its content until it runs within the targeted performance objectives!" explains Mads Maretty Sønderup. 

What you will learn from the Wwise-251 Certification! 

• Understanding Resource Usage
  You will practice the very initial steps of loading audio and monitoring system activity. You will learn how to load a SoundBank, how to stream your content instead of loading it into memory, and how to monitor your system activity using the Profiler layout.
  
  

• Conversion and Compression
  You will learn how to manage audio settings for all audio sources in your project using Conversion Settings ShareSets, and you will compare audio formats, sample rates, and modes to understand when and what to use in various contexts.
  
  

• Voice Management
  Using the Wwise Virtual Voice behaviors, you will analyze and modify priorities of all audio assets. You will ensure your most important assets would not be hindered or stopped in any way, and learn to establish which audio assets Wwise would be allowed to take out when in need. Lastly, you will learn how to use these features in two types of LOD systems, and how to verify your settings even with an extremely low voice count.
  
  

• Effects
  Via controlling behavior and the handling of your audio assets, you will learn about Effect placement and optimize the use of Effects in WAG. You will create an optimized soundscape diversity, while comparing quality and resource usage of reverbs.
  
  

• Platform Management and Mobile Considerations
  You will adapt WAG for mobile platforms and set platform-specific settings. You will learn how to adjust and utilize your audio assets with mobile, by excluding audio sources and properties, reducing concurrent music layers, and/or unlinking features.
  
  

• SoundBank Granularity
  With a content-finished Wwise Project, you will convert the loading of SoundBanks into a granular process, thereby minimizing the runtime memory usage. You will take your first steps towards using the Wwise Unity Integration, and learn how to apply your changes without programming and how to load multiple SoundBanks using triggers and systems.
  
  

• Runtime Management
  For final touches, you will learn how to estimate and assign memory pools. You will learn how to understand the different types of runtime memory, assign new values based on performance testing, and what makes the system call for starvation errors.

Whether you’ve previously encountered performance issues while developing a game or other interactive media, or you simply want to learn how to tackle optimization in advance, any road to learning about optimization is legitimate to your future work!