Automatic management of a mod's wwise soundbanks to limit required user involvement

[RealityMachina]

So a probably poorly written summary of the precise situation that happens with XCOM 2 and XCOM Chimera Squad.

• A mod can utilize wwise soundbanks if they have an .upk file that references a soundbank file (these are .bnk), since an AkBank object in a .upk is what tells the game that it should load a soundbank file that has the same name as the AkBank object (otherwise, it will do nothing with it).
• However, these soundbanks must be in a specific CookedPCConsole folder. The game can only look for and load soundbanks that are either located in the installation location's CookedPCConsole folder, or much more viable for us. a CookedPCConsole folder that may be created in Documents\My Games\XCOM Chimera Squad\XComGame for Chimera Squad, Documents\My Games\XCOM2 War of the Chosen\XComGame for War of the Chosen, etc etc.
• For XCOM 2, this generally isn't an issue outside of mods that specifically utilize wwise (e.g wwise MMS, which has been vanilla only due to limitations that only recently lifted).
• For Chimera Squad, however, the voices of playable agents is reliant on wwise soundbanks: there's no current way to workaround this requirement via a upk with soundcues, for instance.

So the ideal situation would be for AML to have some way of automatically handling mods that have soundbanks so users don't have to manually install the needed assets on their end. Suggestions of junctions or symlinks have been thrown around on the discord, though even simply automatically copy and pasting needed files would be appreciated.

[nintendoeats]

If this is implemented for XCOM and WotC, note that the two require different sound banks from different versions of the Wwise authoring tools. Some system needs to be in place to distinguish what type of sound banks you have. For example, in the System Shock Music Pack I have a Banks folder with the vanilla packs, and a subfolder called WotC with the WotC packs. I'm not suggesting this exact system, it might be better to give each type of bank it's own subfolder; I only did it this way for weird legacy support reasons.

I believe that there is also a slightly different header for sound banks that could be using to distinguish between the two versions, but that comes entirely from opening a couple sound banks in a hex editor and not extensive research.

[Xymanek]

though even simply automatically copy and pasting needed files would be appreciated.

This falls short when we consider mod's updates and enabling/disabling mods. Junctions are great because they are

• Cheap to create/delete
• Provide OS-level way to have same files appear in different locations
• Completely invisible to the software (unless it explicitly checks for junctions)

IMO, we should standardize on some sort of a json file that mods will ship with and AML will use to create/manage said junctions.

Something like aml-wwise.json:

[
 {
  "GameID": "WOTC",
  "ModRelativePath": "WwiseBanksWotc\"
 }
]

Which would result in a following junction if the mod is enabled:

• From: Documents\My Games\XCOM2 War of the Chosen\XComGame\CookedPCConsole\AML_WWISE_JUNCTIONS\[some AML's internal mod/rule ID]
• To: [Mods folder]\[Mod ID]\WwiseBanksWotc