Beginning Game Audio Programming [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

BUYING OR BUILDING AN AUDIO ENGINE

This book's main goal is to teach you how to build an audio engine. In the coming chapters, you'll integrate basic and advanced features into an audio engine. And by the end of the book, you'll have a good idea of how an audio engine works, as well as a completely functioning audio engine you can use in your own games.

Of course, not everyone need write his own audio engine. The glory of capitalism allows you to trade your money for your time and buy an existing audio engine. Here's a list of commercial, shareware, and freeware audio engines that you can use if you don't want to write all this code yourself. To be fair, these are listed in alphabetical order—no favorites. Also, you can find demo versions of several of these engines on your CD.

BASS

Free for freeware

$100 for shareware

$995/$2750 for commercial

http://www.un4seen.com/music/

BASS is a very comprehensive sound engine for the Windows platform. It provides support for all of the popular sound file formats in use today (WAV, MP3, WMA, and Ogg Vorbis), requires only a DirectX 3 interface (so you can use it on NT), understands EAX and 3D sound, and supports the most popular tracked music formats (MOD, XM, IT, S3M).

Another BASS strength is that it supports a variety of languages. Of course, there's a C/C++ API, but there are also APIs for Visual Basic, Delphi, MASM, and TMT Pascal.

The BASS engine is in wide use today, mostly by independent developers.

MikMod

Freeware

http://www.mikmod.org

MikMod is a freeware, cross-platform tracked music library, originally written by Jean-Paul Mikkers (MikMak), and now maintained by Miod Vallat. Several other developers have also contributed to the project.

It supports all the popular formats, and can run under lots of different OSes—MacOS, BeOS, Java, UNIX, and of course, Windows.

FMOD

Free for freeware

$100 for shareware

$1250 for commercial games

http://www.fmod.org/

FMOD is a very comprehensive audio engine available on virtually every platform out there, including PS2, Xbox, and GameCube. It fully supports a variety of C++ compilers, as well as Visual Basic, and includes advanced features such as EAX support and occlusion/obstruction.

ModPlug

Free

http://www.modplug.com/

If all you want is a quick and easy way to play tracked music, ModPlug could be the answer. ModPlug has a very simple interface, coupled with a powerful playback engine that supports all of the tracked music formats you're likely to see in use today. It has interfaces for C++, Visual Basic, and Delphi, and there's also an ActiveX control available.

Miles Sound System

$4,000 for a single product license

$12,000 for a site license

$22,000 for a cross-platform site license

http://www.radgametools.com

The Miles Sound System, a product of RAD Game Tools, is by far the most comprehensive game audio library available. Originally released by John Miles in the summer of 1991, it has currently been used in over 3,000 (no typo, that's three thousand) games. It does everything you want it to. In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, "If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up."