About
Alexey
Oleynikov.
I am a software engineer working in entertainment – games and game audio, location-based experiences, interactive installations, XR/VR/MR and virtual production. Since 2022 my focus has been audio: the systems that decide how a game sounds as the player moves through it – reverb, early reflections, occlusion and sound propagation – at Crytek, and spatial audio technology at Razer and THX. Excited Waves is where that work continues as a product.
Before Excited Waves
From 2022 to 2025 I worked at Crytek as a senior audio programmer, writing audio systems in C++ for CryEngine on Hunt: Showdown and Crysis 4. I worked on a real-time environmental audio system for dynamic reverbs, early reflections and sound propagation, and on the R&D and integration of Wwise Spatial Audio into CryEngine, along with the tools and pipelines around it – including destruction-driven propagation scenarios.
On Hunt: Showdown I also worked on the dedicated audio occlusion system for underground areas. It replaced flat muffling with behaviour that accounts for the distance to an underground entry and how deep the source sits, and defines how sound crosses in and out of the underground – the reworked underground audio Crytek described in the Hunt: Showdown 1896 patch notes. In a game where sound carries most of the information players act on, that readability matters as much as any visual cue.
In the second half of 2025 I was a senior audio software engineer at Razer and THX, where I worked on the THX Spatial Audio+ Wwise plugin – announced for game developers alongside Razer's WYVRN ecosystem at GDC 2026 – and on an IAMF encoder Wwise audio device plugin with a software decoder, showcased at CES 2026.
Before games I spent a decade on real-time systems in other corners of entertainment: interactive installations and location-based experiences, XR and virtual production, multiplayer VR training, motion tracking and real-time graphics.
Why I started Excited Waves
The pipelines most of the industry still runs on – baking acoustics ahead of time, or authoring reverb zones and portals by hand – were built for a different kind of game. They assume a level that gets finished once, stays static, and is rarely touched again.
That is not how games are made now. Teams iterate constantly, and every iteration means redoing manual authoring or re-baking, then hunting the bugs that come with it – time spent on maintenance instead of on how the game actually sounds. And more and more projects are dynamic by design: destructible geometry, procedural generation, player-built spaces. In those, a baked acoustic map is wrong exactly when it matters most.
Excited Waves is the solution I provide for those problems: acoustics computed live from scene geometry, per sound source, with no baking and no authored zones, inside a bounded CPU budget. Engine and middleware agnostic at the core, shipping today as an Unreal Engine 5 plugin with Wwise.
Contract and co-development
Beyond licensing the SDK, I take on audio technology work through Excited Waves. Studios bring us in for systems that need building properly and do not fit an existing role – embedded with the team, working remotely.
Areas we take on: audio programming in C++; Wwise integration and custom Wwise plugins; Unreal Engine 5 and CryEngine audio work; spatial audio, occlusion, obstruction and sound propagation systems; real-time acoustics and reverb; DSP; audio performance optimisation and profiling; audio tooling and pipelines, including WAAPI automation.
If your team needs an audio system built, an integration done right, or an audio-tech problem solved that nobody internally has the bandwidth for, get in touch or email [email protected].
Elsewhere
Company, product and game names are trademarks of their respective owners. Names of former employers and their titles are referenced solely to describe my prior professional experience as an individual employee; names of engines, middleware and tools are referenced solely to identify the technologies I work with. No affiliation, partnership, sponsorship or endorsement is implied, and no work described above was performed by Excited Waves for those companies.