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

Positional audio


The first aspect of 3D audio that we are going to work with (and perhaps the most important) is positional audio. Positional audio deals primarily with the location of each object that produces sound (which we will refer to as audio sources) in relation to or our ears (which we will refer to as the audio listener).

The first step required to create a 3D audio simulation is to describe every audio source and listener in the environment. Note that there is typically only one audio listener in a scene, unless we are creating a multiplayer split-screen type of game. The following figure shows an example of a scene with multiple audio sources and one audio listener in the middle:

For each audio source and listener in the scene, we store information such as position, orientation, and velocity. Using this information, the audio engine produces a 3D audio simulation by modifying all the sounds in real time in several ways:

  • Position: The volume of a source decreases and becomes...