Lost Echo’s Preview 49 – Wwise Updates & Dreamscape Audio

This week for Lost Echo’s, I focused on updating Wwise, testing geometry on the station, and expanding the footstep handling across dreamscapes.

Updating Wwise

I started out by trying to test out geometry in Wwise again, but was noticing some inconsistencies and trying and failing to force meshes to update in the game object viewer, I worked on updating the Wwise Version and plugin.

Setting up Geometry and Rooms

Once the update was done, I went back to testing out the geometry and began declaring separate rooms. I’m being fairly cautious with the geometry, because there is a limit to the amount of faces Wwise wants for geometry objects, and because of how many vertices and faces there are in order to make curved rooms, I’m having to make lower poly rooms that will be hidden at runtime, and that’s where Wwise akGeometry data is pulling it’s data from.

Right now, I have geometry data for half the rooms and doors. I’ll need to go back and export additional data to capture the rest of the rooms and doors.

I really like the idea of having the room doors closed, and still hearing muffled sounds that come from the hallway. It’s something I’m going to continue working towards and testing.

Adding in additional Sounds

After that I started implementing additional sounds to the game that I had, like the shower, reactor room, and fabricator, then I started expanding the footsteps effects to work within the dreamscapes.

Working with Gridmap

While I was adding in additional checks for the grid, I realized that I had messed up the grid in the desert without realizing it. Originally I set up the grid to use cells with 20×20, Models are 40×40, because of that, there were gaps between grid, which caused a number of issues when I was trying to look up the models.

I had to redo the grid, and after that everything worked as expected.

Grocery Store

After that, I started working on the grocery store, which has a number of surfaces to add in, such as

• The Parking lot
• The Sidewalks
• The checkout lanes and shelves
• The roof
• the general store floor
• the plant bed under the sign

For this week, I focused on the parking lot, and aspects of the building, and I’ll revisit the rest later.

I updated the script further to work with Static 3D objects, and add it to my previously defined high poly collision objects just to make my life easier for most of the collisions, such as the objects you could jump onto.

I then went ahead and add in additional Area collision boxes for more specific collisions. Specifically the roof. There’s multiple tiny things on the roof that need to be taken into account, such as the accents, the gutters, the main section of the roof, and the section that juts out. Each of those aspects have been added as appropriate.

What’s next

Anyways, that’s it for this week. Next week I’ll probably work on finishing up exporting the remaining geometry meshes, Defining the Wwise Rooms, testing some ambience for these dreamscapes, and additional sound triggers, and probably some landing sounds for when the player jumps.

Thanks for checking out the project!