These articles explain how you can use multiple emitters to simulate sound sources emitted by large sources: http://kb.gowwise.com/questions/51/ and http://kb.gowwise.com/questions/142/.
When it comes to using multiple emitters, you may either create multiple game objects that play the same sound (or not), or you can use the multi-positioning feature of the Wwise sound engine.
There are two types of multi-positioning: multi-sources and multi-directions.
- Multi-source multi-positioning is similar to using multiple game objects: the resulting sound is the sum of the contribution of all positions, exactly like if there were many game objects. Use multi-source mostly as a performance optimization device. When you have many objects that emit the same sound, but which don't overlap too much, use multi-source multiple positions instead of multiple identical sounds playing in different game objects. At the end of the day, there will be one and only one voice playing, with volumes accurately computed, instead of as many voices as there are positions. For more details, read the "torches" example in the SDK documentation.
- Multi-directions multi-positioning is the preferred method for simulating big objects. The resulting sound is positioned at the position that is the closest to the listener. Thus, in the methods described in the articles mentionned above, you don't have to bother about not having your emitters overlapping each other. Simply put as much "positions" as you want in order to "cover up" all the surface. The listener will always hear the sound as if it was coming from the closest of these positions. Again, only one voice is processed in the sound engine, so this is very efficient.
You should use multi-directions multi-positioning to simulate big objects instead of multiple game objects whenever possible, as they are easier to manage in code and level design, and much more efficiently processed in Wwise.
However, using multi-positioning means that you can only set multiple positions on a game objects. Whenever you wish to change the volume (or any other property) of one of these "virtual sources", or play a different sound, you need to use multiple game objects.
