Hello,

this may be something a little off-topic but it still relates to audio, so I might as well give it a shot and ask some information.

I'm getting into sound design for video games and I came across three different softwares - which, I believe, are the main ones used these days.

I'm not really interested in programming and coding, therefore my question is about what program should be better in audio implementation.

I started using wwise and I find it really interesting, a little tedious, but still interesting.

however, despite audio implementation, what I'm trying to understand is if that's the best option I should aim for, considering what game industries employ nowadays. from what I understood, wwise is pretty much versatile as an audio engine and can be applied to any other game engines around; moreover, it's connectable to nuendo which I think is a great advantage if working on mainly sound design.

my concern is that this might not be the proper choice given that, perhaps, it would be much better to learn how to use game engines which also include audio engines - so, for instance, unreal or unity.

therefore, I'm asking if anybody can give some general advice about this. has anybody come across these programs and had the choice to work with them in a professional context? which one would be the best (in terms of workflow and how many people use them) software to collaborate with game developers?


thank you very much.




10gamberi

Both Unity and Unreal are widely used engines, so it that might just come down to personal preference and/or what the people that you're working with are using (assuming they aren't making custom engines for the game they're making, but that tends to be only done at larger game developers).

CryEngine is another engine that is free, though out of the 3, it seems that CryEngine is the least popular.

All 3 require you to code, though you can go on each engines' asset stores and buy up pre-made code, or just use the reference and tutorial documents and then just copy-and-paste. I encourage anyone wanting to use any of those engines to learn to code in them, because you can't always find the "easy" way out if you want to do something specific in the code.

Try all 3 out. Do some tutorials, make a simple game or two, see what feels best.

Worth watching is this (very very very very NSFW) video from Jim Sterling about Unity, though it does cover the other mentioned engines, as a "how not to do it"

Unreal uses a blue-print like system and recently revamped their audio pipeline with many new features. See Aaron's talk at https://www.asoundeffect.com/future-...unreal-engine/

Unity's native audio pipeline is simplistic so developers tend to use 3rd party middleware such as Fmod and Wwise. Workflow requires more communication between audio and game programmer teams as you're using two separate APIs and synchronizing efforts. My own experience from having developed audio plugins for Unreal, unity, Wwise, Fmod is this. Unreal allows for much more customization due to open-source code. Unreal-Wwise integration/workflow is messy, more so than Unity-Wwise due to differences in runtime compilation in C#/C++.