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

Reverb


Positional audio (with its attenuation, speaker placement, and Doppler effect) comprises the most fundamental level of 3D audio. Now we will cover some advanced techniques that we can use on top of positional audio to provide a more complete simulation of how sounds interact with the environment. One of those techniques is called reverberation, or reverb.

Reverb is the capability of sound to persist in a particular space for some time after the original sound has stopped. We can think of reverb as a succession of echoes with very little time in between them.

Reverb occurs because most audio sources project sound in several directions at once. Some of those sound waves reach our ears directly, in the shortest path possible. Others, however, head in different directions, and reflect off various surfaces, such as walls, before finally reaching our ears. These reflected sound waves take longer to reach our ears than the direct sound waves, and become quieter with every bounce they make...