Unleashing the Power of Voice in Gaming: How GME and Wwise Elevate the Dark and Darker Experience

In the recent Steam Summer Game Festival, "Dark and Darker" made its debut on the Steam and Epic Games Store. As the first game released by the Korean independent game studio Ironmace, "Dark and Darker" exploded in popularity during its initial test on Steam. In just seven days, its average daily online players exceeded 100,000, and it attracted 170,000 people to add it to their wish list.

As a game heavily emphasizing teamwork and cooperation, "Dark and Darker" often requires players to communicate and negotiate with their teammates or even encounter enemies through the voice system. Therefore, the in-game voice system becomes a crucial component in building an immersive gaming experience. Imagine exploring a dark alley when suddenly a voice emerges, sounding as flat as a phone call. Such a situation can easily break the immersion. "Dark and Darker" seamlessly integrates the voice system with the game environment, providing clear and effective communication while incorporating voice effects that match the game's atmosphere. Players' voices not only have a clear sense of direction but also come with reverberation. This echo effect makes players feel as if they are truly in an underground city, making the experience more immersive and natural.

The Unique Advantages of the Wwise+GME Solution

Such an outstanding game voice system relies not only on the ingenuity of the creative team but also on the support of excellent technical solutions. "Dark and Darker" adopts the exclusive voice solution jointly launched by the GME and Wwise R&D teams. Leveraging Tencent RTC's one-stop voice solution deeply optimized for gaming scenarios and Wwise's powerful audio processing and control capabilities, the integration of voice into the game audio design process brings richer voice gameplay to the game.

Game Multimedia Engine (GME) is a one-stop voice solution customized by Tencent RTC Real-Time Communication for gaming scenarios. It provides functions such as multi-person real-time voice, voice messages, voice-to-text, 3D voice, fun voice changing, voice beautification, and voice content review. With a simple interface design and low-threshold access with just four lines of code, it helps developers implement voice functionality in games. GME is compatible with mainstream console platforms and deeply adapts to popular game engines such as UE, Unity, and Cocos, supporting Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android systems.

As the only officially authorized voice plugin for the top-tier interactive audio engine Wwise, the GME and Wwise R&D teams have jointly launched an exclusive voice solution. The GME voice plugin sends both the local voice to be transmitted (the local player's voice recorded by the microphone) and the voice received from the network (the voice of other teammates to be played locally) to Wwise's processing pipeline, deeply integrating with the Wwise audio engine. It innovatively solves the problem of losing game background sound effects when the voice is open and can be combined with game sound effects to achieve richer gameplay. Simultaneously, with GME's echo cancellation and noise suppression patent algorithms, the solution can restore clear sound and utilize echo cancellation technology to help games achieve sound localization in both headphone and speaker scenarios.

Seamless Integration, Unified Design of Voice and Game Sound Effects

In the Wwise project, the GME voice audio stream is seamlessly integrated into the Wwise audio pipeline. The process of integrating voice is deeply merged with the sound effect design process in Wwise, avoiding potential audio conflicts that may arise from separately integrating a voice SDK. On the game program side, the operations of sending and receiving GME voice are abstracted into triggers of Wwise events. These operations are consistent with the standard development process experience of Wwise, which is more direct and intuitive than the previous API call integration method.

Sound Quality Improvement, Perfectly Solving Industry Pain Points

For traditional independent voice SDK solutions, the decline in game sound effect quality, volume jumps, and sound dryness after voice activation have been industry pain points. After voice activation, the overall game sound quality enters a "telephone sound quality" level (low sampling rate mono signal), greatly affecting the player's gaming experience. Wwise-GME effectively solves the problem of game sound effect quality degradation caused by volume type switching after voice activation in mobile games, significantly improving the sound quality of voice after activation. While enjoying smooth communication, players can still maintain the original sound effects and achieve sound localization.

Capability Liberation, Unlocking Unlimited Gameplay Creativity

The Wwise-GME solution brings a very large design space for game voice gameplay. Since the voice stream is entirely sent to the Wwise bus, the rich sound effect processing and control in Wwise can be applied to the voice, and each voice stream can be customized, thereby increasing the immersion and fun of voice in the game process, allowing player communication to "stay in character."

The game voice solution GME and the audio engine middleware Wwise can each improve the game's quality from different angles. GME enhances the social attributes of the game, thereby increasing the game's stickiness to players. The Wwise audio engine greatly improves the development efficiency of interactive sound effects in games and enhances the sound experience in games.

When the game voice solution GME meets the audio engine Wwise, GME fills the gap in the Wwise ecosystem in terms of voice, and the voice processed based on the game scenario is no longer like the traditional independent voice SDK that can only provide a "voice conference" communication experience. It creates better, more realistic, and more creative sounds for the game.

More Application Possibilities of the Wwise-GME Solution

The unique advantages of the Wwise-GME solution provide a richer creative space for voice gameplay, making many innovative gameplays possible.

Sending Environmental Sounds or Accompaniment Music

Wwise-GME not only provides the ability to send player voice but also the ability to send other audio streams to the voice server. The most obvious application scenario for this capability is karaoke. For games, imagine a game scene where the player's character is in the rain or wind. When the player communicates with teammates, an immersive experience requires appropriately mixing the sound of rain or wind into the voice. Of course, there are some other application scenarios, such as sending some sound emojis according to the player's progress in the game to increase the fun of voice.

Simulating Voice Reflection, Diffraction, and Other Processing

An immersive voice experience must consider the rendering of voice in combination with the actual game scene. Texture, attenuation, voice changing, reverberation, and basic 3D positioning processing can only be considered as elementary processing. To better simulate the voice transmission path between the speaker and the listener in the game scene, the reflection, diffraction, sound cage, and occlusion models provided by Wwise can also be used to process the voice between teammates. The application of these processes can bring a more immersive ultimate voice experience.

Character Personality and State Processing

To increase the fun of game voice, some specific DSP processing can be done on the voice according to the changes in the player's personality and state in the game scene. For example, when a player in the game is hit by an opponent and loses blood, distortion, delay, or vibrato processing can be applied to the voice to express the player's painful state. Another example is when a player wins a PK or obtains a high-value item, high-pass filtering or acceleration processing can be applied to the voice to render the player's excited state.

Sidechain Processing

Sidechain is an essential processing method in the mixing process, and its basic principle is to use one signal to control another signal. Adding voice functionality to a game is to increase the social attributes of the game. The voice must be clearly transmitted to the listener. When a player speaks, the focus of the game sound mixing should fall on the voice rather than the game's own sound effects. This is similar to the practice of radio stations, where the DJ will lower the volume of the playing music when they need to speak and restore the volume once they finish speaking. The Wwise-GME solution sends the voice stream entirely into the Wwise bus, making this processing possible in the game scenario. For example, a Wwise Meter can be set at the received voice, and then the volume of other sound effects can be dynamically controlled based on the value of this Meter.

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If you have more advanced requirements such as AI-powered noise cancellation and spatial audio, we offer a fully customized audio/video communication SDK & API family for web, mobile, and games. Tailor your video communication experience to meet your specific needs and captivate your audience with Tencent RTC GME.

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