Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Sound effects are pretty easy things to get running in a game. You simply load a
WAV file and send it into DirectX with volume and looping parameters. Almost
every sound system is capable of simulating the 3D position of the object relative to
the listener. You just provide the position of the object, and the 3D sound system will
do the rest.
Music can be really easy or really hard. Technically, it
s not really different from
sound effects unless you want to get into complicated mixing of different tunes to
reflect what
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s played Halo knows how effective
this can be; the distinctive combat music tells you you
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d better reload your shotgun.
Speech is much trickier
s going on in the game. Anyone who
not just technically, but keeping track of all the bits and pieces
recorded in the studio and matching them with a 3D lip-synched character. This usually
involves anything from a total hack to a carefully hand-tweaked database of mouth
positions for each speech file to a tool that can automatically generate this data.
You
—
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ll see a good introduction to game audio in Chapter 13,
“
Game Audio.
”
The user interface for a game doesn
t look like something drawn by the Windows
GDI. Game interfaces have a creative flair, and they should. This means that the
user interface needs to be baked fresh every time, especially since every health meter
and HUD are different for every game.
The irony of this is that games still need things like a button control, so players can
easily click OK for whatever thing the game is asking about. These controls aren
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t
hard to write, but if you
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re like me, you hate rewriting something that already exists
and is well understood by both coders and players. You
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ll probably roll your own and
hopefully keep that code around from game to game so you won
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t have to rewrite it
ever again. Another option is licensing Iggy from RAD Game Tools or Scale-
Form GFx, which lets your artists create your entire UI in Flash and import the
results directly into your game.
I
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ll cover these topics more in Chapter 10,
“
User Interface Programming.
”
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Having a little déjà vu? You aren
t crazy, because you saw this same heading under
the game logic group just a few pages back. It turns out that game views can use their
own process manager to handle everything from button animations to streaming
audio and video. Keep this in the back of your mind as you read about the Process
Manager in Chapter 7. You
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ll use it all over your game.
