Re: a few audio gaming/programming questions
yeah. OpenAL is very, very, very bad. Very. It looks really great at first, but it's a fight between specs being the documentation and programmers not implementing them, everyone having abandoned it like 5 years ago except one guy who insists that his programming library must act exactly like a fake sound card, and it missing the infrastructure to build advanced features.
What it basically boils down to is this: you can get cool 3D audio but only if using OpenALSoft and if the user fiddles with some magic Inis (in all honesty, there's my fork that allows you to force options, but it's what's called a quick hack really), there are ridiculous limits that stopped really being an issue around 2000, and you have to write higher level stuff yourself, for example audio decoding, file caching, and the like. It will work for simple games, but as soon as you want to do something a little complex it fails hard. In my case, it was accurately pl
aying footsteps and having the sound change properly with the terrain. O, and that INI? If you edit it wrong you'll just break things, and no you can't distribute it with your app-there's one system-wide file and that's it.
So I'm writing my own, as I finally managed to learn DSP to the point of being able to do so. I can't call it useable yet, and I must confess that it will be commercial for closed-source projects. Outside of my work, though, there's nothing I can find. If you care only about mac and don't mind Objective-c, you can use Core Audio which looks really nice, but this is probably not the case. As for BGT, it probably won't happen--I am hearing that BGT does not have the ability to be called from C Dlls, which means that writing a complete binding for anything that uses a callback function is impossible (and you really, really want callback functions). This includes mine. T
here's also some recent work by Microsoft to make personalized HRTFs using a Kinect, but this isn't available yet (and who knows when/if it ever will be). Creative has not officially stopped caring, but they've taken down most of their web sites related to it. Unfortunately, while they did still care, they took out everyone else working on 3D audio via patent trolling of some sort or other. I could rant further, but it would probably not be useful as the rest of it has to do with the atomicity of OpenAL error checking and the absurd need for a thread for everything (also, I've written it elsewhere).
As for programming language, I am personally fond of Python. I would stay away from C++ as debuggability is a killer and productivity will be low. BGT will get you going quickly, but getting beyond the BGT ecosystem (which is basically a spec of dust compared to what you get if you invest a bit of time to get set up with something in
another language) is clearly not something doable from inside BGT. I'd stay away from the JVM, not because it can't be done but because you're going to end up then requiring anyone who doesn't have the right version to download a 200 MB package and install it. Other languages that might be good include C# (everyone has the .net framework these days) and I really can't think of anything else at the moment.
Since you're not able to get 3D audio yet, picking something you know that's capable of playing sound and getting keystrokes is a viable option. And whatever you do, never underestimate game programming tutorials aimed at the sighted-you don't care about the graphics, but all the rest--those parts about how you should react instead of act, including all the code on setting that up, proper control handling, collision, how best to do time--apply to you too. I think that underestimating such tutorials is why we don&
#039;t have a new game from someone every week: if you adopt the practices that sighted game programmers figured out for you and also adopt the everything is a library mentality, you end up with a bunch of pieces you can just reuse again and again. All we need is for someone to open source enough of them.
hope this was helpful, though I can't notice that really it's primarily depressing on the audio front anyway.
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