Re: [Adonthell-devel] Audio module

[James Nash]

Sounds cool!
Some suggestions though....

address@hidden wrote:
> Just now I had some thoughts about the audio module for v0.4 that I
> would like to share. Mainly, it's all about SFX.
>
> For v0.4 it would be cool to have actual sound effects, like bird
> song, waterfalls, etc ...
>
> So I suggest we have something like a sound source that could be
> attached to a mapobject. If the player comes near to it or goes away
> from it, the sound could change accordingly. (SDL_mixer has some
> premade effects for this).
>
> Parameters for a sound source would be its volume. We also need to
> define how often it loops, as not all SFX would loop forever. We
> should also be able to specify a timeframe after which a sound is
> restarted once it has finished looping.
>
> As there will be more sound sources than channels, we need an
> algorithm to only activate those that are nearest to the player.

Dunno if this is what you intended, but it would be cool if the sounds 
gradually fade in as the player gets closer to the object that emits 
them. Perhaps there could be a parameter for the mapobjects that defines 
the radius within which you start to hear it. The volume from there 
until right next to the object could just incremented linearly ( volume 
   = distance from object / sound radius ).


> Apart from these sound sources that are tied to map objects or
> characters, we'd also have to be able to play sound effects whenever
> we want. So I guess we should reserve a number of channels for
> ambient sounds and a smaller number for the rest, like doors creaking
> or combat noises, etc.
>
> Say if we allow a total number of 16 simultanous channels playing, we
> could have 10 for ambient sounds and 6 for the rest, which should be
> more than enough.

That sounds good. I guess if there are more than 10 audible 
mapobjects/characters within range of the player the engine could just 
figure out which are the 10 closest and discard the rest.


Dunno how hard this would be to do - but I guess there might also be 
cases when there are multiple objects within range of the player that 
use the same sound effect. It would be good if the engine could let them 
share the same channel (basically just playing one instance of the sound 
effect). Presumably this would free up resources for other sound effects 
and may avoid problems where the same effect is being played several 
times but each one not being quite in sync and thus just sound a mess 
(OTOH there may be other situations where this is just what you want 
(imagine a crowd of people in a town) so perhaps this feature should be 
optional.


Also, it would be cool if we could add effects to the sounds (like an 
echo). Lots of old SNES games had this and it's a nice touch. Perhaps it 
could be a parameter of the map (or a part of a map) to turn on such 
effects.


        -James