Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
It wasn't long before both Xbox 360 and Windows Vista had launched, Microsoft
turned their attention back to the idea of creating a cross-platform audio API to re-
place DirectSound. They had received positive feedback on their XAudio API from
Xbox 360 game developers, but at the same time, the Longhorn Extensible Audio
ProcessorAPIhadsomeadvantagesoverXAudio,suchasprovidingamorestream-
lined and more efficient audio engine and a few additional features that XAudio did
not have. So, Microsoft decided to take the best of both, and XAudio2 was the result.
So, this means we would obviously want to use XAudio2, right? The answer is yes,
but that's not the whole answer. But this raises another potential question: why is
DirectSound still included in DirectX when it has been replaced? The answer is, of
course, for backward compatibility. Removing DirectSound from DirectX would have
broken all applications that were written using the DirectSound API. They left it in so
that those applications would still work.
As I said, XAudio2 is not quite the complete answer to the API we should use for the
sound needs of our games. You may want to support DirectSound for users who may
have older systems. However, XAudio2 is, as mentioned previously, a multi-platform
API. You can use it to handle your sound needs in applications for Xbox 360, Win-
dows Phone, and Windows PCs (Windows XP and higher).
For completeness, we'll take a look at both DirectSound and XAudio2 in this chapter,
but first let's take a look at what sound really is and some of its properties.
