This post aims to share some changes we made to our development process in the past few months. These changes were made based on feedback from the Wwise community, on delivering Wwise more frequently to reduce the delays in getting the next minor version. We also changed our stance regarding the support of Unreal Engine Preview versions to reduce the friction that can be caused by an engine update.

Releasing Two Minor Versions Simultaneously 

As indicated by the Audiokinetic Support Policy, we regularly release minor versions of the ultimate and penultimate versions of Wwise. (Ultimate and penultimate mean the latest and previous-latest versions, in case you are wondering.)

At the time of writing this post, the actively supported major versions are Wwise 2022.1.x and 2023.1.x. Starting with the release of Wwise 2022.1.10 and 2023.1.1, we have worked on both branches simultaneously to prepare them for a concurrent release. We are calling this the first Sim-Patch release of Wwise. 

We are currently finalizing the fourth Sim-Patch release and are glad to be able to talk about our new development process. We waited to make sure the new process did not have unforeseen consequences that would have forced us to abandon it. The change did raise some challenges for our development team; challenges they have met with their usual creativity and resilience. We are glad to say that we expect to keep sim-shipping Wwise for good now. This means you can expect to see a new minor version every five weeks, as we have been releasing that cadence for all Sim-Patches.

Development Support for Unreal Engine Preview

Another change that was made in our development process in the past few weeks was to provide development support for Unreal Engine 5.4 Preview releases. Although our development team is always proactively monitoring changes to the engine that would require us to refactor our integration code, the official stance of Audiokinetic used to be that we would wait for Epic to officially release a version of the engine before we started making changes on our side. That decision made sense when we consider that some major changes are sometimes introduced by Epic at the last minute before they make a version official.

The feedback from our users indicated that many teams are eager to adopt the new version of the Unreal Engine before it becomes official. To better serve those teams, we introduced the "development support" concept to the Wwise Unreal integration. With the Wwise 2022.1.12/2023.1.3 versions of the Unreal integration, we added the note that states:

Unreal Engine 5.4 Preview support is ready for development. It was tested both in editor and in game for Windows and Mac. It was not tested on consoles or mobile devices. We do not recommend using a preview version of Unreal Engine in production.

In other words, while this version of Unreal should not be used in production, you do not have to wait for the next release of our integration to start working with it.