Audio/XACT

Re: To XACT or not?

Allan Chaney — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:50:18 GMT

Volka,

Nice post! This will come in real handy when I get back to sound production.

also thanks for the link to the other XACT tutorial in your blog post.

Great stuff!

Allan

Re: To XACT or not?

Volka360Dev — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:44:36 GMT

Hi,

some time ago I too wanted to make dynamic music and modify it at runtime. I found some cool tutorials and wrote an article about it at our blog: http://blog.brightside-games.com/?p=109

cheers Volker

Re: To XACT or not?

ThomasRodke — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 02:25:09 GMT

Yeah, it works. I was running 3.0 still so I upgraded to 3.1 and it works now. I guess I was hesitant to upgrade to 3.1 before, because I still hadn't finished going through the book "Beginning XNA 3.0 Game Programming - From Novice to Professional" by Lobao, Evangelista, Farias and Grootjans; and I didn't know the extent of the changes between revisions. But now that I have upgraded I will just handle any incompatabilities as they happen. Thanks, Tom

Re: To XACT or not?

Jim Perry — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:04:07 GMT

If you're talking about this project, it works fine on my machine just by pulling it out of the zip file, doing a Rebuild and running in debug. If that's not the one you're running what are you running?

Re: To XACT or not?

ThomasRodke — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:22:35 GMT

thanks, but specifically on my PC I get the following error message when I try to build the sample XACT "kaboom" sound demo project: C:\Documents and Settings\R\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\PlaySound_Sample[1]\PlaySound\PlaySound\Content\Content.contentproj(52,11): error MSB4019: The imported project "C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\XNA Game Studio\v2.0\Microsoft.Xna.GameStudio.ContentPipeline.targets" was not found. Confirm that the path in the declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk. I don't understand why it is not finding the file?

Re: To XACT or not?

Jim Perry — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 23:37:40 GMT

Try these pages.

Re: To XACT or not?

ThomasRodke — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:35:00 GMT

So how do you get XACT to work? When I tried it a black console window popped up and said "Waiting for authoring tool or authentication" and then just sat there. I had to hit "Q" to quit. When I tried to follow example in Beginning XNA3.0 Game programming book pp. 32-37 my project does not build. It complains that file not found in the folder but I checked and it is there so just in case I copied to the Content folder and checked the binary is in bin folder. so what is going on?

Re: To XACT or not?

lutas — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:05:19 GMT

I finally managed to get the standard fade in/out with a single instance stuff working in XACT.

In case anyone is struggling with it not working at all as I did, I noticed that removing my cue.Stop(AsAuthored) call solved the problem.

Kind of a "well, duh!" moment but if you have "single instancing, set to queue" and call play on the cue again in code, the framework will automatically stop your current track and fade out/in automagically.

Re: To XACT or not?

Christian Herzog — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:12:46 GMT

Thanks for your opinions guys!
I guess since we got things running with XACT, we'll stick to it and try using the compress-settings.

Re: To XACT or not?

T0PSP1N — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:58:31 GMT

Hey Guys,

Did some experimenting with XACT.

Allan, I figured out why the built-in crossfading wasn't working for you...

---------------------
WAYS TO CROSSFADE
---------------------
1) As Jwatte suggested above, use an RPC Preset, and attach any sounds you want to crossfade in your game to it. Then, whenever you play the cue, it will fade in. Right before you play the next cue (or same cue), issue a StopAsAuthored, so that it fades out at that moment. With this method, you will always hear the fade in, even when started from stop (silence).  The RPC preset method gives you a good global fade in/out solution.

2) Built in cross-fading with cue instance limiting

Use this if you just need to cross-fade between sounds in a specific cue. Cues hold a list of sounds. When you play a cue, it will play one of the sounds. Which sound it plays depends on the "cue variation playlist" (random, ordered, interactive variable, etc) Each sound can be composed of multiple waves, put together in seperate tracks, so that when you play the sound, they tracks all play at the same time, and you hear the resulting product.

Lets say I have a Cow cue with three sounds:  CowMooing, CowChewing, CowFarting. Each time I play the cue, say when the user presses 'A', a new instance of the sound starts playing.  I setup the cue variation playlist to be random, so I might get moo, chew, chew, moo, fart, etc... Normally these sounds would overlap if the user kept pressing 'A' super fast. But since I set cue instance limiting max 1 and behavior at max to replace, I don't get a bunch of instances all playing at the same time.  Instead, this instance limiting causes the previous sound to stop and new sound to start abuptly. Next, selecting cross-fading will allow the transition to not be so abrupt. And finally, if you needed to wait to the end of the cows 5 minute moo, before heading into the next sound, this is where Transitions with the option 'END OF SOUND' or 'END OF LOOP' would come into play, solution number 4.

3) Built in cross-fading with category instance limiting

If you have a bunch of cues and you need to cross-fade not only between sounds in a specific cue, as in the above solution,
but also BETWEEN sounds in seperate cues, use the limiting in category instead.

Allan, I noticed the reason the fade-in isn't heard right away in 2) and 3) above, is because: the crossfade behavior only kicks in when a replace occurs. That is, when the max instances is attempted to be exceeded. So the first time you play the cue, you won't hear any fade-in, as there is only 1 instance.  If I let the sound complete (it stops and the instance dies), and start it from this silence, I still don't hear any fade-in, because again, it's only 1 playing instance.  For "fade in, that includes starts/silence" behavior, solutions 1) or 4) seem the way to go.  You could, of course, still use instance limiting and just edit any intro waves to include the fade in.

4) Interactive Variables and Transitions

Transitions allow you to have more persise control over how you go from one specific sound to another specific sound.  For crossfading, this is probably an overcomplicated solution. I think solutions 1) or 3) are easist and best.

Here's my example transition, going back to the cow object again :) Say we wanted to make it so when a cow moo is heard, followed by a cow fart, an intermediate 'stomach moan' transition sound was heard.  Transitions let you do that. Or on two successive cow moos, 'loud applause' transition is played on-top.  Transitions would let you do this too. A cross-fade would be another type of transition.

This is done by specifying each of the 9 combinations in the transitions pop-up.
Example: From: stop (silence) to
                        moo,
                       chew,
                        fart
             From moo to
                       chew
                       moo
             From chew to
                      moo
                     fart
             From fart to
                     chew
                     moo

Transitions require interactive variables.  When the user hit 'A' and played the cue, the sound selected to play was random. It could have been ordered, where it is played in list order.  There's also interactive. With interactive, a variable is used to determin which sound is played. Moo sound range might be set from 1-40, chew from 41-90, and fart from 91-100. Like RPC, variables are used to control things. But instead of controlling parameters, the interactive variable you create and select in your cue controlls: which sounds get played.  The sound that gets played is whatever one has a range that contains the variables current value. This value is sent to XACT by:
----- Cue Instance Variables -----
Cue cow = sounds.GetCue("cow");
cow.SetVariable("CowState", 1);
----- Global Variables -----
audio.SetGlobalVariable("GlobalVariable", 1);

If your variable changes in code, if it makes a new sound range, the new sound for that range will be played immediately and old sound end.
If you setup the ranges so that they all overlap, say all 1-100, the sound selected seems random. The sound is played immediately. You don't even need to re-issue a play cue. If you don't want that abuptness, then in Transitions, select END of SOUND or END of LOOP for source in all the items. In transitions, select (Crossfade without Transition) for the items you want.  This will mean when your variable switches from sound A to sound B, there won't be an intermediate transition sound throw in, like the 'stomach moan' (Sequential Transition), nor an overlapping sound like the 'loud applause' (Concurrent Transition) Instead, in this scenario, when the variable switches from sound A range, to sound B range, we simply crossfade.

5) Controlling the volume of individual tracks or sound using SoundEffect API, based on variables changing with time (stopwatch class)

Anyways, these were my crossfade findings!  I'd imagine 1) RPC Presets 3) Category instance limiting and 5) Volume control are the most common methods used in XNA games. If you've got any methods that work for you, feel free to add!

Cheers,
TOPSP1N (Chad)

Re: To XACT or not?

Allan Chaney — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:29:40 GMT

Jwatte,

Thanks...I'll take a look at that. I thought the fadein, fadeout were some kind of presets. I didn't realize I needed curves in the curve editor in order to define them. I just assumed when you chose Linear vs. Logarithmic, Equal Power, as a crossfade Type in the Instance Limiting Window, you were defining a straight curve for the fade. Man that's confusing that you also have to define a curve manually.

Also I like using a game component for my AudioManager.cs. That way I can put the AudioEngine.Update() in that components update loop and I'm gauranteed that it gets hit every game update cycle.

Allan

Re: To XACT or not?

jwatte — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:37:43 GMT

You need to set the fade-in and fade-out curves in the curve editor, and assign them to your sound.

I create an "RPC Preset" called "Music Attack Releaese."
Then I edit this preset, and for Variable, I choose "Attack Time," I have it affect Track 1 and Volume.
I add another Variable to the preset, I choose "Release Time," and I have it affect Track 1 and Volume.
Now, I can attach this pre-set to a music sound, and it will fade in/out as appropriate.

Btw: make sure that you call AudioEngine.Update() each time through your Game.Update(), if you don't already.

Re: To XACT or not?

Allan Chaney — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:02:32 GMT

I sshould probably add that I've done a bunch of web searching and can't seem to find any tutorials on XACT that demonstrate the use of variables and RPC presets.

Again...any links at all would be appreciated.

Allan

Re: To XACT or not?

Allan Chaney — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:01:05 GMT

jwatte,

Thanks for your reply on this subject.

If anyone could provide some links to website tutorials or even the MSDN documentation that describes the use of variables, RPC presets, fadein, fadeout it would be greatly appreciated. I've read everything I can find on MSDN and I haven't found anything that addresses the fadein, fadeout and limiting instances or the setup of a variable and RPC preset with code to show how to use it. I've found very basic examples on MSDN on variables and RPC but it's only "Here is what this option does."....... Not Here is how you setup a variable, RPC Preset and the code you need to use it. I have some books that do a good job of demonstrating combo sounds in XACT like you describe. But it's funny, out of the 7 XNA books I have, not one attempts to address using a variable or RPC preset for anything. The only example I can find on MSDN that controls volume, uses a category to change music volume.

I specifically checked the Limit Instances check box on my music Cue Name and even on the Music Category that I have assigned to my game music. I chose Replace, Lowest Priority, Linear for the buttons. I set Fadein and out to 3.0 (secs).

I play the cue sound...no fadein.

I stop the cue music with .Stop(AudioStopOptions.asauthored); ......no fadeout and the music keeps playing. i have to use Immediate to get it to stop.

    
             TitleTheme.Stop(AudioStopOptions.AsAuthored);

Allan

Re: To XACT or not?

jwatte — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:11:11 GMT

I spent days with XACT trying to get a variable tied to an RPC Preset tied to a sound in order to simply change the volume of a sound in game. I could not get it to work.

The "problems" with XACT are all with the UI of the tool. Some things, like the attack and release volume waves, are not very intuitive, but when you know how to use them, they are a snap. Similarly, the RPC-to-volume mapping is very easy to use, once you've done it once. I think what you need is to read through the documentation on MSDN, and one or two good tutorials on the web, and then you'll have a different view of XACT. It's a really nice and capable tool, and a great way of authoring sounds that are more complex than your typical menu "button beep."

For example, if you want to create a flexible crash effect that starts with an initial contact sound, followed by a resonant thump, followed by some secondary debris/scatter sounds, then you can sample three variations of each of those, and set up a playlist for a cue in XACT that gives you 27 different crash effects! If you add random variation of pitch for each of the sounds as well (just up/down 1 semitone is plenty), you get a sound effect that will never sound the same twice. Try doing that with SoundEffect, I dare you! :-)