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

Introducing the FMOD Designer


The FMOD Designer is the high-level, data-driven API that complements the FMOD Ex low-level engine that we have been using so far. It contains two parts:

  • FMOD Designer: This is a sound designer tool that allows us to create complex sound events and interactive music for our games (from http://www.fmod.org)

  • FMOD Event System: This is an application layer that lets us use the content created with the designer within our games (comes bundled with FMOD Ex, inside the fmoddesignerapi folder)

The FMOD Designer projects have the .fdp extension, but to use them inside of a game you must first build them from the Project menu. The build process generates a .fev file, containing all the information for every sound event in the project, and one .fsb file for each wave bank in the project, which is where the audio files are stored. The following is a screenshot of the FMOD Designer user interface:

The most important task of the FMOD Designer is to create sound events. There...