Wwise Help

Let's say you are creating a role-playing game that takes place on a ship. As part of the ambience, you want seagull sounds. You want the seagulls to appear as though they are flying around the ship. To accomplish this, you can set the positioning to 3D User-defined and then create several different sound paths that will simulate the flight pattern of the birds around the ship. You can make the seagull sounds even more realistic by attenuating the sound using an Attenuation ShareSet.

User-defined positioning can be used for a variety of other purposes in your game, including non-localized ambient sounds, such as insects, birds, and monkeys in a jungle environment.

When using User-defined positioning, you have the option of locking the position of your animation paths to the orientation of the listener in game. When the two are locked, the sound will always be heard through the same speakers regardless of the orientation of the listener. When the two are not locked, the listener moves independently of the path. This means that the sound will be heard through different speakers as the listener turns around.

The following illustration demonstrates what happens to an animation path as the listener changes orientation, when the Follow Listener Orientation option is turned on and when it is turned off.

You can set the Follow Listener Orientation option on the Positioning tab of the object's Property Editor. Since you can't change the listener's orientation within the Wwise authoring tool, you will only be able to hear the difference in a SoundFrame implementation of your level editor or in game.