Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Why Do We Need Middleware?
To see a good example of how audio middleware can be used, let's look
at a car racing game. A car has a motor and when the car goes faster, the
sound of the motor changes in dif erent ways—RPMs increase, there's
shifting of gears, and the engine sound changes its pitch and intensity
accordingly. Using the old school method, a sound designer would
deliver the appropriate sounds to a programmer as described above.
In this case, let's say the designer makes three sounds: car sound slow, car
sound medium, and car sound fast. The programmer or integrator would
take these three sounds and write lines of code that would trigger them,
in real time, in the game as the car got faster. The programmer would
need to take the time to program the sounds, adjust them and make sure
they worked correctly during gameplay, and while they were doing that,
they could not be doing other programming tasks.
Now let's take this same car sound and look at how it could be developed
using audio middleware. First of , the biggest dif erence would be that
this whole task can be accomplished by you, the mighty sound designer!
Most audio middleware packages worth their salt provide what is called
a
graphical user interface
, or GUI. So you would work in this interface,
which kind of looks like Pro Tools or other DAW applications, and deliver
a i nished sound setup to the programmer. In this case, the audio
designer and the programmer only have to know and agree on certain
parameters, called
hooks
, that are used in the code.
Implementation using middleware. 1: The audio
designer communicates with the programmer
regarding which parameters or 'hooks' to have in the
game; 2: The designer uses the asset list and sound
i les and coni gures everything in the middleware
tool; 3: The designer/implementer sends the build
i le plus any bank i les to the programmer; 4: The
programmer puts these into the game and does not
have to coni gure the sound to play—it just works!
Yaaay! 5: Upon success, these two can have lunch or
not. . . .
Credit:
Images from Corinne Yu (Flickr).
