Hi everyone, As part of the Pacific Northwest Film Scoring Program (http://www.pnwfilmmusic.com/courses.asp#interactivegames), this fall I'm teaching a course on composition and sound design implementation for games. I'm hoping to find a few interested game developers who would be willing to partner with the students to develop your ...

Hi Tom, Cues themselves don't technically loop - they can play a sound that loops though. But if you want to dynamically (through code) control the looping behavior, one straightforward way would be to keep the sound itself non-looping. When you start playing the cue, register for a XACTNOTIFICATIONTYPE_CUESTOP notiifcation on it, and when ...

X3DAudio is a 'math' library rather than a DSP library. The calculation of coefficients for an emitter/listener pair in XAudio2 (or XAudio1 for that matter) is quite similar to XACT3DCalculate -- you set up the emitter and listener structures, then call X3DAudioCalculate for the pair. Once you have the coefficients and other data it ...

Hi Richard, Got it. So you effectively want to expose your driver as an audio output that can then listen to data sending to it and manipulate it? That was in essence the hardware 3D positioning model of DirectSound - while sound cards could do their own value add for 3D simulation, it often led to unpredictable results for game developers; the ...

Hi Richard, 3D audio in DirectSound is not particularly transparent, so intercepting its calls might be the only viable option there. However, in XAudio2, 3D is pretty transparent, implemented separately as the X3DAudio math library. You pass it coordinate geometry, it passes back speaker values that you apply yourself. The library can be ...

Yup, that was the limitation I was talking about - the delay is only before the first time the bird would play. So for spurious occasional playback, the programmer will have to fire off a separate cue every time. You can still use the timestamp and offset properties so they only need to fire the cue, wait for it to notify them that it's completed, ...

Hi John, I may be misreading the question, but you can actually hook all of the file I/O callbacks in XACT; then it's up to you to deliver the content to XACT when it requests it for playback, and you can store/stream it however is most appropriate for your game. For more info, check out the documentation pages for XACT_FILEIO_CALLBACKS, ...

Hi Shigan, Categories live in the .XGS (global settings) file, which is built by the authoring tool when it builds wave banks and sound banks (you can change its default name and location in the property frame by selecting the top-level project node up in the project tree). Make sure you're including the one you've built most ...

So each play wave event has its own loop property; when a play wave event is automatically created by dragging a wave into the sound (as it sounds like you did), that play wave event defaults to looping if loop points were present, or defaults to one-shot if not. I'm guessing the water had loop points and the other elements didn't, as one would ...

Hi there, There are a couple of possible ways to do this -- using a single cue (for instance, named ''MyAmbience'') or multiple cues (''BackgroundAmbience'', ''Birds'', ''Flies'', and whatever other cue names you want triggered). For the former, the programmer would trigger it once; for the latter, the programmer would fire off the base ...