Sunday, October 24, 2010

32-channels sound engine

The previous incarnation of SOTE was somehow limited in the sound department: Adventure Game Studio didn't offer much control over channels and volumes.
Now, the new sound engine in Multimedia Fusion 2 uses 32 channels and controls each one of them and their volumes one by one.
Channel 1 is devoted to the main background music;
Channels 2-3 hosts occasional secondary musical cues mixed with the first one;
Channels 4-7 is used for diffuse environmental sounds;
Channels 8-12 for audio sources with volume calculated upon the distance from the player;
Channel 13 for footsteps with volume calculated upon the perspective scaling of the player and different step effects based on the type of terrain the player is walking upon;
Channels 14-32 are used for other simple occasional sound effects.


Everything can be done easily, supporting once again the goodness of a difficult choice, the one which led us from a well known program, AGS, to another one, MMF, completely different and not ready to create graphic adventures before having spent much time developing a proper engine.
From a certain point of view, we're recreating AGS inside MMF plus building a SOTE engine.