A video game & software development blog by Christopher Horenstein.
Posts tagged 3D Audio
Excuses, Excuses
0497 days
by Chris H.
in Getting Started
Where to begin?
According to WordPress, 323 days ago I posted a development video of what I was calling Ne+. That whole idea/game perished shortly after. There were many reasons why I never saw it through to completion, but at the end of the day I gave up and it was my fault.
One of the reasons was that I started working for Intel. Even now I can’t say what it is I’ve actually been doing professionally for the last year, except to say it’s certainly the best work I’ve ever produced and it’s been a very exciting and interesting ride for me. Hopefully I’ll be able to link to some images and videos soon.
A few weeks ago I was looking over the code I had written for my senior project. There was a lot of good stuff in there, although a lot of it needed to be cleaned up. Getting lighting, shaders, 3D audio, a tile engine, and other components all working was no small task. And a lot of it can be used to a greater purpose, I hope. So with that in mind, I’ve started working on a new project. Mistake number one is that it’s already far more ambitious than my first project, and we know what happened to that one. I won’t claim it’s going to be great, I won’t even give it a name, but I am going to keep putting time into it here and there.
The first big thing that I did was implement a different tile engine, so that now the senior project code I wrote is being used to create an old-school top-down tile movement system. You can draw boundary tiles in Tiled and be able to run into them with your character, and just yesterday evening I created an NPC class that you can also run into, although the way I implemented the collision checking for those was a little hackish. Movement speed is isolated in a configuration file as it should be. I also have a space skybox with a nice 3D camera to play with, currently used as the background of my main menu. I think I should be able to get a lot of mileage out of it for many different pieces of the game.
So, I really won’t say too much more now, as I just want to have something to show at this point. But there are still things in the works, and right now I am more productive than I’ve ever been.
Does it sound like it’s raining?
0888 days
Yep! I just got done adding a new class to allow game objects to play audio, using the helpful information here. I’m using XACT to manage all of my audio files, so I created an initial Wave Bank and Sound Bank and instantiate those with the AudioEngine class, and then just take requests from other objects when they want sounds to be played. For now, I’ve allowed my map files to have a “BackgroundTrack” property defining the name of a background track to play for the map, and it’s the sound of rain to go along with the rain particle effect that I’m using in the current demo.
So it’s great that all that’s figured out. The next thing I need to do soundwise is figure out how to have so-called “3D Sound,” but in my 2D environment, so that as the player gets closer to certain sound-making objects the audio for them gets louder. I realize now that the “dynamic audio” I had in mind is not exactly difficult, because I can just play sound whenever I want with any object; all they need to do is request the correct sound be played at the correct time. I’ll probably move on to other functionality for now, because at the moment I just wanted to make sure that I could create a basic Audio class and be able to play sounds or background tracks with it.
The real next step is going to be integrating a configuration library I found called EasyConfig, which will let me define configuration files easily and intuitively. After that’s done, I’m going to move on to either creating a MovingPlatformComponent that moves between a list of points at a given speed, or creating a simple way for me to script basic cutscenes so that I can create the opening sequence for Ne+.