Making Music Interactive: Elaboration of the Feature Set in Wwise Part 4

Article by Louis-Xavier Buffoni

This Is The Fourth Part In The Series. If You Have Not Read The Third Part Start Here. The First Part Is Here.

Sample Project

You are invited to go on Audiokinetic's website and download the latest version of the Wwise authoring tool for free, along with the Sample Project at gowwise.com. This sample project comes with a beautiful interactive music design, composed by artists Michael McCann and Tim Rideout, and integrated into Wwise by Audiokinetic's producer Simon Ashby.

The music design consists of a switch container called "02_Music_Complete", which manages the musical transitions between menu and game mode. Below it are two other switch containers, one of being "In-Game Music", which manages the transitions between 3 game states: "Stealth", "Stress" and "Fight". Set the "Music_Global" and "Music_inGame" state groups to "In-Game" and "Stealth" respectively. Now play container "2_Music_Complete", and change the value of the "Music_inGame" state group while music is playing to hear the beautiful transitions, morphing the music instead of using brutal stops and plays.

Notice the following characteristics of the design:

- "Stealth" and "Stress" use cross-fading "Immediate" to "Same Time" transitions.

- The first segment of "Stealth" blends with the first segment of "Stress", the second with the second, the third with the third.

- In order to have an elegant transition between "Fight" and the other states, a specific transition segment had to be composed: "Outro_to_stealth_or_stress".

- The use of a continuous game parameter: "Stealth Factor", which changes the volume of "Ambiant" and "Drums" tracks of each segment of the "Stealth" playlist.

- Trigger "StingerBonus", which is overridden in the "Fight" playlist.

- Trigger "Backup_Team_Arrives", which associated stinger, "Interlude", lowers music volume through bus ducking.

Conclusion

I think that we came up with a relatively simple and consistent feature set despite the diversified requirements and conceptions of what interactive music is. Some games may require tight integration with music that may not be obvious to implement with what was described here. There are code-side hooks to the music engine that were not presented, which may be used to do such things. Of course this involves coding on the game side... this was only the tip of the iceberg!

References

(1) BAJAKIAN, C., "Enemy X", IASIG Interactive XMF Workgroup (IXWG), Test Case Scenario, May 2004.

(2) WHITMORE, C., "NOLF", IASIG Interactive XMF Workgroup (IXWG), Test Case Scenario, May 2004.

Author's Bio:

Louis-Xavier Buffoni is a software developer at Audiokinetic and part-time musician.