RE: [BULK] Any Free Audio Game Engines: Thoughts and Requirements

  • From: "Sean Farrow" <sean.farrow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2007 07:47:06 -0000

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:
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