Hi: Fmod Ex along with it's sound designer will do the job. Web site: www.fmod.org The source license is expensive but if you don't need thecode there is a share ware license. Hth Sean. -----Original Message----- From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Veli-Pekka Tätilä Sent: 23 November 2007 07:34 To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [BULK] Any Free Audio Game Engines: Thoughts and Requirements Importance: Low Hi, I'd like to prototype some audio game ideas in Perl, so my question iss, is there a cross language audio engine especially suited for audio games available either as a standard Windows DLL or via COM. both cases can be used from various languages with ease e.g. Perl, Ruby or VB, for instance. Here I'm outlining basic, intermediate and advanced requirements that come to mind as a coder and musician, although I've never coded an audio game in particular. Well, even meeting the basics would be great. Basic: It should be able to asynchronously playand manage 1 to n audio samples with real time control over attributes such as amplitude an pan position. Metadata about loop points in formats such as wave should be respected, looping ion on or off, and in case of conflicting sampling rates the engine should be able to neatly upsample everything to a common highest or user specified rate. OH yes and low latency would be nice, so good bye MME and welcome DirectSound. Intermediate: The ability to hook some event handler to a case where a sample restarts its loop or to programmatically mix a new sample at the next loop start would be useful, as would be programmatic control of loop points, info and metadata on files such as length, unit conversions between time, samples, frames and various other things. On the sound production side I once worked with an engine called FMod, I think, which allowed you control over sound priority, should polyphony run out, and amount of random changes in playback rate, amplitude and pan. slight pitch shifting is a standard technique of bringing in a bit of variety early 3D shooters like Duke and half-Life come to mind. Since we're talking about audio games, ideally the thing should be able to mix in and resample SAPI generated speech and software based MIDI, say via the GS Wavetable Synth. Producing MIDI or speech asynchronously is not the problem here, I have APIs for doing that, but mixing and resampling the sources plus synching their latencies inherent in all three streams, including the horrible GS Wavetable MIDIlatency and SAPI engine load times on voice change, is the hard part. Oh yes, and the ability to load DLS sound banks for the GS Wavetable synth would greatly extend the sound palette. Advanced: I wish the engine could also have various effects such as pitch and frequency shifting, low high and band pass filtering, time stretching and the various delay and pitch based effects such as delay, flanger, phaser and chorus, I believe some of these are used in auditory icons, too. Or alternatively have support of loading and patching together VST effects for a sample or group of them as well as controlling the effect parameters via the plug-ins string based user interface. There are loads of quality freebie VSt plugs available as stand-alone DLL files, no installation, registration or initialization needed, just throw all VSt plug DLLs ina single dir or subtree and play. Since I know a lot about subtractive, analog-like synths, though mainly virtual analogs and software modulars, I think it would be interesting to use such a synth for obviously arcade like sound effects. The beauty of such a setup is that even a hardwired virtual analog is more flexible than changing sample data which sufres from pitch shifting and time stretching artifacts and it is hard to introduce good sounding, wide amplitude, pitch or timbre modulation afterwords via effects with LFOs or envelopes. Again too implementation choices come to mind. Either hook up to an existing real time sound environment via the open sound control API, such as ChucK or Pure Data (PD). Heck, you could probably even code simple audio games inside these environments. Or again extend the VSt host thinking idea further and add the ability to host any VSt soft synths as well. Again there are good freebies and those freebies are as good in generating basic sound effects, as is any other virtual analog synth. YOu could have much the same API as for effects, too, apart from sending these synths note data. I've also read bits and pieces about microsoft's DirectMusic, so does any audio game use that? Basically programmatic support for transforming musical i.e. MIDI sequences and stiching together various motifs based on in-game events. Think, Lucas Arts' imuse system in the DOS days, only better I guess. I have never really used DirectMusic so cannot comment on how useful it actually is. I suppose few mainstream games take advantage of it since all music tends to be CD based or some compressed audio file format such as mp3 or ogg audio these days. As opposed to formats carrying musical data such as MIDI and the various module formats. Hope this generates some recommendations, ideas and discussion. -- With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming: __________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind __________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind