Volume, Pan, Frequency and Voice Allocation handling system

**Nifflas** · 16th November 2011, 02:56 PM

In every game, I've been fighting how to make complex sound operations, and not make them conflict. You know, imagine the scenario that you need to globally slow down the frequency of every sound by 50% - but you already have a lot of things affecting the frequency of various samples. Or, let's say you need a bomb to explode which is so loud that it "eats up" all the other sounds, then they slowly fade back - while not having that mess up all your other volume settings in your game.

This is the solution I finally came up with. When you need to play a sound, create a "sound emitter" object and configure all its settings. If you allocate a range of channels it'll play on, it'll pick a free channel, or if none is free, it'll pick the one that last began playing a new sound.

Now, let's say you've decided to put all your sound effects on channel 5-15, and you want to set the frequencies of all those channels to half. That's where the modifiers come in. Clone one of the modifier objects, or even create a new one at runtime. Set the range to 5-15 and set the frequency multiplier to 50% and the rest happens automatically!

**Nifflas** · 16th November 2011, 03:27 PM

I forgot to say... There are two limitations to this system.

1: I based it on Alterable Values. So, you only have 26 channels.
2: You can not actually modify individual sounds while they're playing. You can only modify what happens on ranges of channels. There's no problem having several modifiers affecting the same range, and a range can also be a single channel. This is a channel-based system, so the game needs to be planned out accordingly. The only safe operation outside using emitters and modifiers is that you can stop a sample or a channel.

**Stephen** · 16th November 2011, 08:15 PM

This is amazing! Great work.

**Fernando** · 16th November 2011, 09:32 PM

As Stephen said, Amazing!!!

I take my hat off!!!

**iamjot** · 17th November 2011, 08:18 AM

I´m used to a very high quality if Nifflas is producing something. But is is making me really happy. I mean really, really happy. i tried to create a dynamic sound system for Pitir - yea... it was kinda dynamic in the end... BUT this file is just fantastic. Very interesting possibilities! Thank you!

**Fanotherpg** · 17th November 2011, 02:43 PM

Nifflas have you tried OpenAL object done by Looki for me?

**Nifflas** · 17th November 2011, 10:41 PM

Sorry, it's just not what I need for the time being. I mean, it's a cool extension and everything, but this makes more sense with the game I'm currently working on.

**Nifflas** · 22nd November 2011, 08:55 PM

Here's version 3. Version 2 had a problem with whenever channels were stolen from continuous emitters, because the continuous emitter would be kept but affect the new sound.

The best fix was to make continuous emitters uninterruptible. The alternative solution would be to make continuous emitters automatically removed when their channel was stolen, but I thought that would not give enough control to the user.