next »

[Martin 2BAM]

I wrote a guide/tutorial on how to make sounds sound like they should depeding on their position (sound spatialization), also to work the way that it's expected for 2D games.

The tutorial is written for SFML actually, but the theory can be applied to other libraries like OpenAL or such.

Is kind of lengthy, but has graphics to make it less painful.

As spanish is my mother languaje, if you find any errors in the writing or also if you do in the theory or code, be free to point them out. Any feedback is welcome!

It includes code examples in C++ for SFML and a working example project.

I hope you like it
Link:
http://blog.tbam.com.ar/2009/05/sound-spatiaiization-for-2d-games-in.html

-Martín

[Mir@k]

No spanish version?

[Martin 2BAM]

No, sorry

[Reiss]

thanks!  i haven't ever gotten deep into audio programming before, so that tutorial was pretty helpful.

[Martin 2BAM]

You're welcome

[ChevyRay]

That was an excellent read! Your wonderful diagrams made it all the better, too

You mention at the beginning that the tutorial is long, but I thought it was just perfect. Too many tutorials do just that, explain the guts of the coding, and don't really start out by explaining the actual topic at hand in a language we can all speak.

Write more!

[Martin 2BAM]

I'm glad you liked it!

I have some other not-easily-found topics on my mind but, even if it doesn't seem so, it's really an exhausting task for me!

I think graphics are a must, but making them and writing not in my mother language, and trying to make it readable for people that are new to the subject... takes a while

Thanks for the support!

I'll drop a little publicity here :D: you can check a real-life example of how it works in this game I'm making (link).
It's subtle, but I think realistic.
I use almost the same code as the one from the spatialization tutorial.

Next I'll be writing one about priority sound managers for a limited amount of sound sources.
* The basic one, just a resource handler.
* A priority handler that can reown a resource at any time depending on:
  * Priority: More important sounds (e.g.: dialogs over gunshots) always should play.
  * and Distance: Discarding "really far away" spatialized sound from playing with a coarse square root table. And modifying the real priority if given a sound distance from the listener.

Also making an advice about how SFML says that it's Sound class is a flyweight (like "Sprite" for graphics) but actually each object owns an OpenAL sound source (a resource!)
So having, for example, enemy objects owning Sounds, even if they're not playing any, will inabilitate others to work (they can be out of resources)
In some OpenAL implementations, sources are limited to 64... or even 16!

Regards
-Martín

[Martin 2BAM]

Oh, spammers indeed.

[Melly]

Oh, spammers.