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

Chapter 6. Low-level Audio

We have now reached the final chapter of this book. So far, we have worked with audio at many different levels of complexity and abstraction, using both low-level and high-level audio engines. These audio engines provide an invaluable help to the developers, and we should definitely use them whenever possible. With their help, we have loaded and played audio files, learnt how to control sound parameters, simulated sound in 3D environments, and created complex, multi-layered, interactive sounds.

In this chapter, however, we will pretend that these audio engines do not exist, and work with nothing more than the bits and bytes that represent sound in a computer. We will then re-implement, in a simplified form, many of the features that FMOD takes care for us. We will also take a brief look at sound synthesis, which is the act of generating sound using mathematical formulas, instead of relying on recorded audio.

The purpose of this chapter is to further our understanding...