Hello UE audio community!
I’m a veteran sound designer working in games for over a decade. I’m familiar with the old UE audio engine and I’ve been working in Wwise+UE4 for a few years now and I’m very familiar with Wwise.
My CTO asked if we might need Wwise on future projects. The question was whether the time saved due to the Wwise feature and tool set was worth the licensing fees. I said I’d have to get back to him as I wasn’t familiar with the new audio engine and all of the cool stuff UE can do in the NEW audio engine. After looking around a bit at the available resources I do have some concerns where I think having Wwise saves me some time. What I’m wondering is if someone or many someones can tell me if there are easy-ish workarounds for the following systems that I can easily build or use in UE4.24+ / UE5 WITHOUT bothering the programmers to build custom tools or solutions.
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Rooms and portals - Are there easy ways in UE to build the kinds of spatial audio systems afforded by AkSpatialAudioVolueme and AkAcoustic portals? I’m particularly interested in the diffraction and obstruction behavior that Wwise and Unreal make easy to implement and understand.
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Conventional multi-track music systems - Wwise has a robust dynamic music system with great transition rules, fade-out and triggering behaviors and a lot more. From what I can tell, metasounds aren’t really build to handle the kind of multitrack system that many audio designers use in building out big orchestral music systems in games. Am I misguided in thinking this?
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Profiling - Wwise makes it easy for me, the sound designer, to look at the profiler in real time and diagnose problems all along the signal chain. Does UE offer any kind of analogue specifically tailored for profiling audio behavior and performance?
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Performance optimization - Wwise has the tools for creating specific conversion profiles for different platforms. It also has the ability to say play a specific voice /event on one platform and just click a radio button to determine whether to play the same voice in the same configuration on another platform or play something more performant. Wwise also has an analyzer which can automatically adjust sample rates based on frequency content, thus saving loads of memory. Are there any tools like this in UE (again, without having to bother the programmers.)
Thanks for any and all input!