Re: Cross Platform Audio Game Engine

  • From: Dave <davidct1209@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2011 04:11:19 -0800

To add a few notes to the discussion:
It's hard to come up with an audio game engine if you don't know what
type of game you had in mind in the first place.  Think of it as
incentive--if you have a basic playable game that consumes the engine,
it would help fuel new ideas for the engine to expand.  Another
question is what platforms did you want to support?  Probably
Windows/Mac.  Therefore, we're talking about investing a significant
amount of time to understanding the low-level audio API's in each
platform (DirectX, OpenAU, and alsa/pulseaudio being the three that
come to mind for win/mac/linux).  It then is up to you to design an
API (set of classes) that abstract away low-level details to provide
common services such as 3-d audioscapes, in-game objects,with physical
notions of time, density, distance, location, etc., TTS/speech
recognition services, and whatever else your target game(s) may
require.  This will vary wildly from a simple game of cards to an
audio only 3-d flying game.

So, to summarize, if there were an extensible architecture such as
very generic classes and good wrappers for platform low-level audio
services, and a few games in mind to serve as proofs of concept, I
think the project could get off the ground and I'd be personally
interested in helping out or even starting it.

On 1/13/11, Homme, James <james.homme@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,
> I remember an arcade game called Poll Position, where you had a real
> steering wheel. It really made sounds when you were driving your car too far
> to the side of the track. I didn't want to spend too many quarters trying to
> figure it out, but I actually got through one level of it. I was so happy.
> That's why I liked the game Jim Kitchen made that had race tracks in it. He
> made the game, I think, in Visual Basic 5.
>
> Jim
>
> Jim Homme,
> Usability Services,
> Phone: 412-544-1810. Skype: jim.homme
> Internal recipients,  Read my accessibility blog. Discuss accessibility
> here. Accessibility Wiki: Breaking news and accessibility advice
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ken Perry
> Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2011 4:23 PM
> To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: Cross Platform Audio Game Engine
>
>
> Laugh I used to love Nintendo 64 crash up derby.  I actually beat my two
> sons a few times because they would start fighting over the bomb and I would
> be slamming into other cars as they blew up.  It was cool because if I hit
> something to the right it would vibrate right and same for left forward.  Oh
> and man did you know when you died.  I didn't like 007  because they enjoyed
> shooting me in the butt.
>
> Ken
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Homme, James
> Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2011 2:28 PM
> To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: Cross Platform Audio Game Engine
>
> Hi Ken,
> You are right about this. I'd love to be able to play video games with my
> son. He hates any of the games for the blind that he has seen so far. The
> action in video games is so fast and complex that I don't know how I'd be
> able to process it with my ears and play very well.
>
> Jim
>
> Jim Homme,
> Usability Services,
> Phone: 412-544-1810. Skype: jim.homme
> Internal recipients,  Read my accessibility blog. Discuss accessibility
> here. Accessibility Wiki: Breaking news and accessibility advice
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ken Perry
> Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2011 12:51 PM
> To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: Cross Platform Audio Game Engine
>
>
> Tyler you need to re-think your idea of what accessibility is.  This of
> course is just my opinion but if I cannot sit down and play a game against
> sited players as well as blind it's not accessible.  Take card games for
> example.  There is All in play but no self respecting sighted person would
> pay to play something they can play on pogo so you're stuck with a group of
> blind people playing blind people.  I want to be able to play scrabble
> against anyone and so Graphics do matter.  In fact that is one reason I
> liked the game of break out even though they are not where I would like them
> to be yet my wife was able to play the break out game but it was to slow for
> her.  That can be fixed.  No graphics can't.
>
> Ken-----Original Message-----
> From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Littlefield,
> Tyler
> Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2011 12:37 PM
> To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: Cross Platform Audio Game Engine
>
> I've started a project like this, which is just in it's early
> development stages. What I aimed to do was provide a simple setup for
> someone to use, use Lua (as it's quicker than Python) for the scripting
> language, and make it free, and/or possibly open source. There's one
> that David Greenwood of GMA wrote, but from what I understand he wants a
> few thousand for it. The goal with my engine is three-fold: First, I
> want to be able to make a bit of cash if someone sells the game. Say, $5
> per game. Second, if someone would like to create a free game, they are
> free to do so. Last, I want to make this easy to use with good complete
> concise documentation. I don't know of any open source game engines for
> accessibility, you could use something that wasn't so big on 3-d
> rendering but had a good audio setup for something like this,
> accessibility is just audio after all, and there doesn't need to be
> anything special to make a game accessible that a decent engine couldn't
> do. There is also XNA with C#, if you like c#. I don't mind it so much,
> I've always wanted to get around to writing my own archiver for it
> though, since it only plays WMA files (and those are kind of big). So, I
> hope some of this rambling helped.
> On 1/12/2011 10:15 AM, Lex wrote:
>> Hi Storm,
>>
>> 12.01.2011 18:32, Storm Dragon пишет:
>>> I have searched for this on Google but not really found what I am
>>> looking for.
>> I am also interested in the topic, so I searched something like "3d
>> game engine architecture" and found some books on the subject to read:
>> http://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Architecture-Applications-ebook/dp/B001C4QKD4
>>
>> http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Engine-Architecture-Charles-Development/dp/1584504730
>>
>>
>> And lots of books on the subject is here:
>> http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4621536/Game_Design_eBooks_Pack
>>
>> I dreamed about creating a game engine  for audio games from the
>> beginning of my programmer story, since I started to learn
>> programming. I made a couple of attempts but newer finished my work
>> because of different reasons such as change of major language (from
>> Delphi to C++), lack of time, etc. Finally, I decided that such a task
>> is almost impossible to achieve by one person with limited time
>> resources (I am taking a degree at the university on software
>> engineering). Last months my interest on the subject has even
>> increased. Now I am researching different connected topics (like how
>> to bind C++ code to python nicely) etc. During my previous attempts to
>> build an engine I have learned a lot and I hope that one day I will be
>> able to finish my work.
>>> I guess my question is, what is involved in a game engine?
>>> I assume it makes writing games easier, and it is based off already
>>> existing programming languages with functions and/or objects to make
>>> game creation easier.
>> Yes. Game engine consists of several subsystems (sound, events, input,
>> physics, network, scripting - to name some of them) and some
>> abstraction which connects all of that together (to make it an engine,
>> not only a package of libraries). The last part is, IMO, the most
>> important: there exist a lot of libraries helping in game creation
>> which can help to develop audio games, but there isn't some layer
>> which presents all that stuff in way, which allows end-developer to
>> concentrate on the game logic, instead of problems like "how to move
>> my sounds when the object moves" or "how to bind keys/joystick/mouse
>> to my functions", "how to invent a
>> yet-another-game-saving-restoring-feature" etc.
>>> I know there are several audio game companies out
>>> there, and in an attempt to get more of them to do cross platform work,
>>> I was considering starting work on a game engine.
>> Consider joining me and collaborate on this. My target language is C++
>> (for the core of the engine) and python for scripting.
>>> I guess pygame is a game engine,
>> I believe that pygame is a set of libraries, not an engine.
>>> but it is mainly designed for
>>> sighted play. So if I wrote an engine could I build it using pygame as
>>> the backbone, and just make it easier to add sound generating objects?
>> I don't think that will be enough.
>>> Would it be better to do some platform checking and use openal in *nux
>>> and directx in Windows?
>> starting from vista, DirectX no more supports hardware accelerated
>> sound, leaving one only with openal as a wide-accessible alternative
>> for using hardware sound.
>>> One thing that would be really awesome is to
>>> make it easy to make graphical games with accessibility. My ultimate
>>> dream is to have games that are accessible for everyone, not just blind
>>> or just sighted users.
>> Then you might look at some existing open-source graphic game engines
>> and extend one of them to help developing accessible games.
>>
>>
>> Lex
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>
>
> --
>
> Thanks,
> Ty
>
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