Audiokinetic Wwise Knowledge Base

States are global, whereas Switches are bound to game objects. Usually, use a State whenever the state of the game needs to have an effect on all sound instances. For example, the game would set the State globally on the sound engine depending on what mode it is in, so events triggered by the game would use the corresponding sound, regardless of the game object.

Consider the opposite scenario: your weapon sounds are children of a WeaponType switch container. If you can have several characters (game objects) using different weapons at the same time, then you would more likely use Switches, so that the game can select a Switch value for each individual game object.

Internally, Switch values are stored for every game object, while State values are stored once, therefore the latter option is more efficient if you don't need the flexibility of switches. Also, with a State, you can affect the properties (volume, LPF, ...) of all sound structures which are bound to it (through the State tab in the Property editor).

One last note: Music Switch Containers of the Interactive Music hierarchy are more efficient to compute music transitions when they are registered to a Switch Group, because State changes have the ability to be delayed depending on the music time (meaning more computations).