Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Environment Morphing
You're probably already aware that the use of reverb in various types of
game environments is very common. How dif erent sound environments
transition from one to another is a good example of environmental
morphing. Your character can be walking from an outdoor environment
into a church, or simply from one room to another. These transitions can
morph smoothly or they can be sudden and dramatic. It all depends on
the requirements of the game and design approach.
Audio Engine Needs
Basic audio functionality is fairly consistent from game to game. Audio
designers at minimum want to be able to start a sound and stop a
sound, loop a sound, change the pitch of a sound, or any number of
other standard audio operations. Programming even this apparently
simple functionality ei ciently, however, can be a i nancial and technical
challenge. If you are running a company that is in the process of building
a game engine, you might not even want to try and add audio features to
your engine. Instead, you might want to license some pre-existing audio
technology that has a full feature set and is ready to plug and play. Nearly
all middleware tools will try to provide a comprehensive set of features
to cover these basic audio engine requirements, as well as the more
complex ones we discussed earlier.
Here is a short, platform agnostic overview of what you will i nd in most
audio middleware on the market today. Bear in mind that this is a very
general look and the specii cs can vary greatly.
In this image we clearly see the split in
functionality for middleware. Composers and
sound designers use the GUI-based editor
application, while programmers either work
with the API or sometimes with the codebase.
Credit:
Images from Corinne Yu (Flickr).
