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

Loading a sound


The most common way to get audio data is to read it from an audio file. However, as we have seen before, there are many different audio file formats, and reading the audio data out of them is usually a non-trivial task. This is particularly true with compressed audio file formats, which require decoding the audio data using some algorithm, before we can use it in our application. In general, it is usually better to use an audio engine, or an external library, to read the contents of an audio file.

For educational purposes, we will be reading the audio data from a WAV file. We will, however, work under the assumption that the WAV file we read from is in the canonical form (that is, it contains only a format and a data subchunk, in that order) and that the audio data is stored without any compression. Under these conditions, we know where all of the data is stored, and can simply index into the file to read it. That is certainly not the case for every WAV file, which would require...