Setting Up Weapon Audio

RS2 Weapons are setup to provide 2d 1st person audio and blended near/ distant 3d audio for 3p. The 1st person audio also utilizes the KF2 echo system.

2d First Person Weapon Audio Single Shot (no fully auto)

• Stereo single shot audio should be set up as 2d.
• Reverb is applied within Wwise. Shot should be dry with a mild tail.
• 4-5 variations are a good standard. Wwise provides the ability for random pitch shifting.
• The same audio is used within Wwise with different effects applied for each environment setting.

The reverb setting is applied to the effects tab for each environment. Use the existing sharesets.

• Set these to “Render”, if not you will have CPU performance issues

Use the “Environment_Reverb” state groups for the weapon environment setups.

In the properties of the AKEvent in UE3 you need to set the “Use Environment Reverb Switch Group” to true. This picks the proper state when you fire.

3p Shoot Sounds Single Shot (No Full Auto)

• Set up a blend container
• Set up a random container for the distant shots
• Set up a switch container that uses the same  “Environment_Reverb” state group settings for the near shots ( including the reverb effects)
• Use the same shots as you did for 1p for the 3p near shots

Set the attenuation to use “WEP_Rifle_3P” for 3P weapons sounds. This is good starting point. You can switch to custom and adjust if needed.

• Set up the Blend Container to use the near and distant shot sounds
• 417 and 1000 seem to work well overall for the blend (adjust as needed)

Full Auto Shoot Sounds

• These consist of a looped fire sound, a tail for the loop, and a single shot (if it is multi fire mode)
• Echo should only be applied to the tail (and single shot) for 1P sounds. Not the looping sound.
• Care should be taken when creating the looping distant sound so that it properly blends with the near sound. These will fire at the same time and need to crossfade in a pleasant manner.
• Make sure to set these up in script as high rate of fire weapons. That switches them over to the looping system.

Echo System

We are using the KF2 echo system. This does a ray trace in 4 directions from the player when you shoot. It finds the nearest 4 reverb volume edges in each direction and plays an echo from there (with speed of sound applied in the engine).

Wwise Setup for Echo

• Import echo sounds and place them in a switch container and child random container under the 1P Actor-Mixer (the switch
• I set up both indoor and outdoor (indoor is a dummy with volume set to 0, I don’t use echoes indoors, it gets messy)

In the AKEvent in UE3 set the “Advanced” settings. Set the “Use Advanced Sound Functionality” box to true. Set the echo sound slots to use the echo sounds you have imported for the gun shot.

• For any sound (1p, 3p, echoes) that use the Environment Switch groups set up in wwise, make sure you check the Use Environment Reverb Switch Group in the Unreal Event properties. See picture below.

Handling Sounds (KF2 only - RS2 does not play 3rd person handling sounds due to the high player numbers)

I create a single set of reload and handling sounds that play in 2D for the owner of the weapon and 3D for others. These sounds are contained in the animations and cannot call distinct sounds. This solves the issue of strange panning when in first person.

Use an RTPC to define the position type. Code sets this value based on whether you are the owner of the weapon or not. It is only updated if you change camera modes.