Book Image

Getting Started with C++ Audio Programming for Game Development

By : David Gouveia, David da L Gouveia
Book Image

Getting Started with C++ Audio Programming for Game Development

By: David Gouveia, 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

Chapter 2. Audio Playback

In this chapter, we will perform two of the most fundamental operations in audio programming—loading and playing audio files. This might not seem like much, but it is already enough to get us started adding audio into our games.

There are many different audio libraries available these days, such as DirectSound, Core Audio, PortAudio, OpenAL, FMOD, or Wwise. Some are available only on certain platforms, while others work almost everywhere. Some are very low-level, providing little more than a bridge between the user and the sound card driver, while others provide high-level features such as 3D sound or interactive music.

For this book, we will be using FMOD, a cross-platform audio middleware developed by Firelight Technologies that is extremely powerful, yet easy-to-use. However, you should try to focus more on the concepts covered, instead of the API, because understanding them will allow you to adapt to other libraries more easily, since a lot of this knowledge is...