Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
element has to be coded by hand. To the extent that a developer was
already doing most of the coding in ActionScript 3, Flash's well-known
scripting language, the shift to HTML5 and JavaScript is not as big a deal,
but to the more inexperienced and less code-savvy (including audio
professionals), there aren't a lot of options.
Oddly enough, Adobe is addressing some of these issues with their
Creative Cloud series of cloud-based services, somewhat similar to
Google's but focused on graphic and media publishing. The tools, called
Edge, are focused for web and mobile web developers. Before they
stopped development, Adobe also updated Flash CS6 Professional to
support output to JavaScript instead of SWF, using a series of tools called
CreateJS, which has smoothed the path even further.
For audio professionals the current environment is just as challenging as
the one for graphics professionals. Audio playback in HTML5 comes with
its own <audio> tag and that tag provides some useful characteristics,
like support for compressed audio formats (like Ogg Vorbis, for example).
The actual functionality of that audio tag for use in video games is
currently—well, “inconsistent” would be putting it nicely. As a result
of this currently broken approach, a number of solutions are being
proposed. Currently SoundJS and SoundManager 2 provide relatively
decent functionality, using a combination of HTML5 audio and Flash
fallback when HTML5 audio isn't supported.
ENTER THE WEB AUDIO API
This diagram shows how WebAudio routes sound from its various
input nodes to the output context, which can be thought of as a
master output on a mixer.
Credit:
Mike Pennisi from bocoup.com blog post.
