I wanted to quickly share a game audio implementation tip that is so helpful and simple, I'm sure many already do it, but for so long I had no idea I could be doing it. And that is the use of pips in events for spotting audio in game!
I first encountered this when I was doing some contract work on Moss, Stephen Hodde would send me game captures with pips in them so I knew what moment I was covering, and most importantly where to start my renders so I could be confident that the timing would be correct in game.
So to do this first I create all the events I need- in this case I am using Wwise- and play a very short sine wave (called a pip) with those events. I could add the pip as a sample that I've generated from a synth, but in Wwise I like to use Wwise Sine to generate this pip. You can do so by adding an empty "Sound SFX" object and selecting Add Source>Wwise Sine. I've set the frequency to 1300h and the duration to 0.1 so it's nice and short and noticeable.
Then I hook up the events in the game engine and grab a capture with the pips. This is also a good step to make sure that the events are actually firing and with the timing that I expect.
The pip is Powerful because it's very clear on the waveform where it plays, even if it wasn't solo'd during the game capture. Its start time is very visually precise, and best of all I know that there is 0 latency between the event posting and the pip playing.
So now that I know precisely when my event fires, I'm free to design from that point on the waveform and render without fear of needing to do many timing adjustments once the designed sound is in game!
This post was originally a thread on Twitter, which you can find here:
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