Unlock Immersive Game Experience with GME Integration for Wwise
The State of Mobile 2021 report issued by App Annie identifies PUBG-like, shooter, and MOBA games highlighting social interactions as the most popular game categories, which are the main drive in the increase in gameplay time. Voice interaction in blockbuster games such as PUBG, Call of Duty, and Free Fire has already become a player habit. Innovative social games such as Roblox and Among Us are also widely popular among Gen Z.
Although multiplayer gaming and social interaction have become mainstream in the game world, how to deeply integrate game voice into gameplay and restore the real world experience for players remains a challenge.
What is the GME for Wwise solution?
The GME for Wwise solution not only helps games easily integrate the voice chat feature, but also maximizes the immersive gaming experience. This article will introduce the unique benefits of this solution from three aspects: solution strengths, technical implementation, and voice features.
Game Multimedia Engine (GME) is Tencent RTC's one-stop voice solution tailored for gaming scenarios and provides abundant features, including multiplayer voice chat, voice messaging, speech-to-text conversion, and speech analysis. You can connect to the GME SDK by calling APIs to implement voice features in your game.
The connection process of traditional standalone voice SDK solutions is designed independently of the game sound effects. In contrast, for games developed based on the Wwise sound engine, the Wwise + GME solution can include voice features in the game sound effect design process. Wwise's powerful audio processing and control capabilities can be applied to the voice features, which provides a larger space for designing voice features for game sound effects while improving the sound quality. Below is the basic flowchart:
As shown above, GME's plugins send all the local voice stream (voice of the player recorded by the mic) and the voice streams received over the network (voice streams of teammates to be played back locally) to the Wwise audio pipeline, where the GME voice streams are abstracted into Wwise's basic audio sources for processing. It is based on this novel design that the Wwise + GME solution has unique strengths over traditional standalone voice SDK solutions.
Unique strengths of the Wwise + GME solution
Unified design for voice and game sound effects:
In a Wwise project, GME voice streams are seamlessly connected to the Wwise audio pipeline, and the voice connection process is deeply integrated into the Wwise sound effect design process, avoiding audio conflicts that may occur during connection to a separate voice SDK. On the game client, the operations of sending and receiving GME voice streams are abstracted into triggers of Wwise events. This makes such operations consistent with the standard Wwise development process experience, which is more straightforward than previous API call-based connection.
Effective solution to the problems of declined sound effect quality and sudden change in the volume level after mic-on:
In traditional standalone voice SDK solutions, the declined game sound effect quality after mic-on, sudden change in volume level, and dry voice all are pain points in the industry; especially, the sound effect quality of the entire game will degrade to the sound quality level of phone calls (mono signal at a low sample rate) immediately after mic-on, which severely deteriorates the game experience. In contrast, the Wwise + GME solution effectively solves the problem of sound effect decline caused by volume type switch. This greatly improves the sound quality and enables players to identify other players' positions during smooth voice chat with the original sound effects retained.
