Scott Bilas Senior Engineer at Loose Cannon Studios had a presentation on the last Wwise Tour 2009 at Seattle, with Robert Ridihalgh, co-founder OMNI Audio. They talk about Tornado Outbreak and the Wwise implementation on the game. Scott is sharing on his blog the presentation files with the slides of his lecture at Seattle, and the Wwise Project File for the game.
On Tornado Outbreak, I did most of the engineering and the initial audio rig design and prototyping. Robert and his team did the actual audio work, and took over management of the Wwise project. They probably did 95% of the audio related work on the project, which is awesome! As everybody knows, engineers are really slow and are pulled in 20 directions at once, so the more I could step out of the way, the better.
The event was recorded, so at some point we may see video clips showing up online. That will be necessary to get Robert’s part of the talk, because he was exclusively walking through the Wwise project, using elements of it to tell his story. So no slides, you’ll have to get the video if it comes out. Anyone using or considering Wwise should try to get a hold of that – his talk was really interesting and includes some great tricks on saving memory without sacrificing variety.
I also got approval from the bosses to release the Tornado Outbreak project file for Wwise. This is really generous of them to agree! Here it is. Note that this doesn’t include any content (wav files) but is only the project itself. That should be plenty though.
The point of releasing the project is to help out other studios who are integrating Wwise, in hopes that the favor will be returned. Everybody benefits from information sharing like this. With Wwise, in order to get a good rig set up you really need to have experience and good examples to draw from. As I say in my presentation, Wwise is different. Every other SDK out there is a “play samples + DSP” library. Getting the Wwise rig right is hard, and it’s not going to be right the first time. Just as if you were to build a Maya rig and had no experience with it before. You’ll screw it up for sure.
Audiokinetic provides some synthetic examples to help get started, but it’s not from a real, shipping game, and besides, every game is different. Tornado Outbreak has an enormous amount of unique objects that produce audio (over 400) and all those crashes and shakes and panics can become very difficult to manage. It would have saved a lot of time if, when I started building the initial rig, I had some examples to draw from. To that end, we’re releasing our particular solution for this situation. I hope that it inspires even better solutions and ideas on how to tackle these kinds of problems in the future.
[Download Tornado Outbreak + Wwise = Love PPT]