Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
'
don
t want to, and believe me, Miles makes this easy. Bottom line, do yourself a favor
and get Miles for your game.
Other audio technologies, like FMod or WWise, take playing sound buffers to the
next step and allow tighter control over sound in your game: how sounds are
mixed, which sounds have higher priority, and what tunable parameters your game
can tweak to make different effects in real time. WWise is more expensive than
Miles, but it is more capable. The audio team used by Red Fly Studios, GL33k, swears
by WWise, and they make the best sounds in the game industry. FMod is a good
choice since it is free for noncommercial software development.
DirectInput encapsulates the translation of hardware-generated messages to some-
thing your game can use directly. This mapping isn
t exactly rocket science, and
most programmers can code the most used portions of DirectInput with their eyes
closed. The weirder input devices, like the force feedback joysticks that look like an
implement of torture, plug right into DirectInput. DirectInput also abstracts the
device so that you can write one body of code for your game, whether or not your
players have the weirdest joystick on the block.
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There are tons of other bits and pieces to coding games, many of which you
ll dis-
cover throughout this topic. These things defy classification, but they are every bit as
important to games as a good random number generator.
Beyond that, you
'
ll find some things important to game coding such as how to con-
vince Microsoft Windows to become a good platform for your game
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—
a more diffi-
cult task than you
d think. Microsoft makes almost all of its income from the sales of
business software like Microsoft Office, and the operating system reflects that. Sure,
DirectX is supposed to be the hard-core interface for game coders, but you
'
'
ll find
that it
'
s something of a black sheep even within Microsoft. Don
'
t get me wrong, it
'
works and works surprisingly well, but you can
t ever forget that you are forcing a
primarily business software platform to become a game platform, and sometimes
you
ll run into dead-ends.
Debugging games is much more difficult than other software, mostly because there
'
s
a lot going on in real time, and there are gigabytes of data files that can harbor nasty
bugs. Combine that with the menagerie of game hardware like video cards, audio
cards, user input devices, and even operating systems, and it
'
'
s a wonder that games
