Book Image

Getting Started with C++ Audio Programming for Game Development

By : David da L Gouveia
Book Image

Getting Started with C++ Audio Programming for Game Development

By: David da L Gouveia

Overview of this book

Audio plays a fundamental role in video games. From music to sound effects or dialogue, it helps to reinforce the experience, convey the mood, and give feedback to the player. Presently, many games have achieved commercial success by incorporating game sounds that have enhanced the user experience. You can achieve this in your games with the help of the FMOD library. This book provides you with a practical guide to implementing the FMOD toolkit in your games. Getting Started with C++ Audio Programming for Game Developers is a quick and practical introduction to the most important audio programming topics that any game developer is expected to know. Whether you need to play only a few audio files or you intend to design a complex audio simulation, this book will help you get started enhancing your game with audio programs. Getting Started with C++ Audio Programming for Game Developers covers a broad range of topics – from loading and playing audio files to simulating sounds within a virtual environment and implementing interactive sounds that react to events in the game. The book starts off with an explanation of the fundamental audio concepts, after which it proceeds to explain how to use the FMOD Ex library, how to implement a 3D audio simulation, how to use the FMOD Designer toolkit, and how best to work with multi-layered sounds with complex behaviors attached to them. The final part of the book deals with working with audio at a much lower level by manipulating audio data directly. This book will provide you with a good foundation so that you can successfully implement audio into your games and begin pursuing other advanced topics in audio programming with confidence.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Getting Started with C++ Audio Programming for Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Multi-channel audio


Another aspect that we should talk about is that many audio systems have more than one output. By sending different audio signals to separate outputs (called channels), it is possible to produce the illusion of directionality and space. The number of channels on these systems can vary from one (mono) or two (stereo), to several more on surround sound systems.

The PCM format described earlier can store audio for multiple channels at once, by interleaving one sample from each channel in the correct order. The following figure shows an example of this for a stereo system:

Besides volume and pitch, which we have examined earlier, there is another property that you will usually find in every audio library, called panning. Panning applies to stereo systems, and allows you to simulate the position of the sound, placing it anywhere between the left and the right channels. For positioning in configurations with more than two channels, you normally use other advanced features, such as 3D sound.