Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
used a funny little compression scheme that not many game audio
folks knew about at the time called MP3 (of course music MP3s were
tremendously common in the music i le sharing community). The use of
MP3 compression within Flash made for a fairly straightforward audio
workl ow.
There was no need to compress i les ahead of time and all the audio
assets could be created in a typical DAW (Digital Audio Workstation—
like Pro Tools or Logic) at CD quality or higher. Then once the sound
was imported into the Flash library, various compression schemes were
available to bring the size of these i les into line with the speed of the
user's internet connection. No more worrying about downsampling and
no more valiant attempts at trying to make low bit rate audio sound
good. That was the upside—the downside is that Flash could not trigger
MIDI i les and had no ability to add reverb or equalization to the sound
after it had been created—everything had to be baked into the audio
i le. Again, one step forward and two steps back.
Now, as the years went on and bandwidth increased in speed with
DSL, Cable Modem and T1 lines, downloadable games started to
get a lot more complex. You could still trigger PCM audio with the
aforementioned limitations, or use MP3 (the more common approach)
but, the number of channels available grew to eight or more and the
quality of the MP3 compression also increased from 8 or 16Kbps to as
much as 192Kbps, which is pretty much CD quality. Nowadays, it is not
unusual to i nd downloadable games with as much as 20MB of audio in
them, the total downloads for the entire game sometimes over 100MB.
As small as that might seem, you just might be surprised how much rich
audio content you can i t into a game this size by utilizing these new
compression technologies.
Early cell phones had extremely low bandwidth and dif erent standards
for each device. Some had little FM music players on board, some
didn't. There were a ton of dif erent handsets on the market, all from
dif erent carriers and manufacturers, though lately the smartphone
has dominated with fewer manufacturers. Still all of these devices have
dif erent audio specs. What a nightmare. Seriously, there are still over 100
dif erent audio formats and they all have special converters and special
programs for creating them. Some games even ship, yes, you guessed it,
with no sounds at all. . . !
Now, the iPhone and iPad along with Android devices are changing the
playing i eld for Social, mobile games and tablets. With these games
there is a fair amount of rich media, and most importantly, standard
development platforms. These devices can run natively within their
respective OSs, or as Flash or HTML5-based Apps (with or without the
