I’ve written about the Wwise Authoring API quite a bit before.
While I think more people understand its capabilities today than when it was first announced – I still don’t think most of you understand just how close you are to some serious workflow improvements.
I don’t mean large tool sets using batch .wav import, creating mix interfaces, or anything that’s such a major undertaking.
I mean seemingly minor, incremental tools that take 10-30 seconds off a task that you repeat over and over throughout your day.
But what do I mean?
Well, let me show you an example of how you can create a script (or have one of your team’s programmers throw one together) and call it from within Wwise itself.
External Editor Magic
There’s a decent likelihood that you’ve used Wwise “Edit in External Editors” option before. You can use this menu to jump back and forth between Wwise and your DAW fairly smoothly.
What I’m 100% sure you don’t know is that you can also use this menu to call your own WAAPI scripts.
So for example, if you have a script or simple utility that could copy all of the properties from one Actor-Mixer and paste it to a new one – you could use it here.
What if you wanted to automatically generate placeholder robo-VO for your entire project (or specific nodes)? This one has already been written once.
So how does this even work? Don’t you need to have an .exe to run as an external editor?
No, you don’t!
The Process, Simplified
The rest of this post won’t teach you how to write your own custom utility. I’m saving that for another time. But I will explain what you can do if you want to take advantage of this workflow (and even create something with a programmer) right now.
WAAPI is extremely powerful due to its inherent nature of communication. If you don’t already know how it works, it’s fairly straightforward – using a program or custom script, you send text-based commands over a network connection to Wwise, and Wwise responds back with the information you requested.
The fact that Wwise communicates over a network makes WAAPI programming language agnostic. If there’s a language that can communicate over WAMP (which is a specific network communication protocol), you can talk to WAAPI with it.
This means you can use languages like Node.js (which is essentially Javascript) to spin up really quick, compact utilities that work with Wwise.
You can, but do not need, to build a giant external-to-Wwise utility in C# or C++ that only an engine programmer knows how to work with. If you can learn something like Javascript (and you can), then you can start building utilities for WAAPI.
Worst case scenario – you don’t know how to code and you’re not interested in it. You can still take your ideas and get them implemented by a programmer incredibly quickly.
So let me walk you through the very simple basics of how Bernard’s Text to Speech system works:
- The utility itself uses Node.js to both speak with Wwise and communicate via Powershell with Windows native Text-to-Speech
- A simple command-line batch script (a .cmd or .bat file that tells Windows command line to execute a simple command) calls this Node.js file
- This batch script is added to Wwise via the “Edit in External Editor” Window, using the “All Files” option in the dropdown box.
While some (or all) of this may sound like gibberish to you – I implore you to pull one of your programmer friends over and ask “is doing this really simple?”
You’ll get this response – “Well, I if it isn’t hard to learn WAAPI itself – hooking this up won’t be hard.”
And for someone who knows a bit about what they’re reading, I promise, WAAPI isn’t hard.
OK stop reading this, I swear – go grab your programmer and ask!
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