Getting Started with C++ Audio Programming for Game Development: Written specifically to help C++ developers add audio to their games from scratch, this book gives a clear introduction to the concepts and practical application of audio programming using the FMOD library and toolkit.

David da L Gouveia

$43.99

4.8 (4 Ratings)

Paperback Aug 2013 116 pages 1st Edition

David da L Gouveia

$43.99

4.8 (4 Ratings)

Paperback Aug 2013 116 pages 1st Edition

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Key benefits

Add audio to your game using FMOD and wrap it in your own code
Understand the core concepts of audio programming and work with audio at different levels of abstraction
Work with a technology that is widely considered to be the industry standard in audio middleware

Description

Audio plays a fundamental role in video games. From music to sound effects or dialogue, it helps to reinforce the experience, convey the mood, and give feedback to the player. Presently, many games have achieved commercial success by incorporating game sounds that have enhanced the user experience. You can achieve this in your games with the help of the FMOD library. This book provides you with a practical guide to implementing the FMOD toolkit in your games. Getting Started with C++ Audio Programming for Game Developers is a quick and practical introduction to the most important audio programming topics that any game developer is expected to know. Whether you need to play only a few audio files or you intend to design a complex audio simulation, this book will help you get started enhancing your game with audio programs. Getting Started with C++ Audio Programming for Game Developers covers a broad range of topics ‚Äì from loading and playing audio files to simulating sounds within a virtual environment and implementing interactive sounds that react to events in the game. The book starts off with an explanation of the fundamental audio concepts, after which it proceeds to explain how to use the FMOD Ex library, how to implement a 3D audio simulation, how to use the FMOD Designer toolkit, and how best to work with multi-layered sounds with complex behaviors attached to them. The final part of the book deals with working with audio at a much lower level by manipulating audio data directly. This book will provide you with a good foundation so that you can successfully implement audio into your games and begin pursuing other advanced topics in audio programming with confidence.

Who is this book for?

This book is perfect for C++ game developers who have no experience with audio programming and who would like a quick introduction to the most important topics required to integrate audio into a game.

What you will learn

Design complex generative /interactive sounds
Simulate an environment with 3D audio and effects
Load and play audio files in several formats
Control audio playback and many sound parameters
Adapt an audio API to fit the needs of a game

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L. R. Nov 12, 2013

This is the perfect book to everyone that wants to start using sounds within an application. It provides you with very important data in order to understand how to exploit the sound capabilities. It is performed step by step and through examples. It starts with all the basic data about sound theory like volume, pitch, channels, etc. Then it shows you the data file formats and how to start a first app using sound management playing sounds from a file using FMOD as sound engine.In general the book examples are based on C++ and considers the use of the FMOD sound engine for them. The book also explains the FMOD EX API and Design tools and how to exploit them practically in all the possibilities. It covers also the use of file in memory or as stream, how to load, play and manage the sound, how to exploit the channels, pitch, volume and panning, mono, stereo and 3d sound simulation, how to simulate an environment with obstruction for the sounds.Personally I selected this book because I'm involved in a personal project that aims to create an application for kids with learning disabilities. This book has helped me to understand how to manipulate the sounds in a manner that enables me to adapt the sound of my app to kids with sensory disorders. So this book is not only for game development then I consider this book very relevant to everyone that has a project that requires to exploit the sound capabilities within a software application in different ways.I strongly recommend this book to every developer experienced or beginner that aims to create software using sound.

Amazon Verified review

Corey Blackburn Nov 07, 2013

Overall this book is exactly as the title suggests, an introduction to audio for game development with C++. It assumes that you are at least familiar with C++ and jumps right into audio. It should be noted that this book uses the FMOD audio engine.The first chapter serves as an introduction to the core concepts of audio. It's short, sufficient and has good visuals to explain each topic. We learn of sound waves and their properties volume and pitch. Then we moved on to representing a sound wave as either analog or digital and using sampling rate and bit depth when converting from analog to digital to control the quality. Last we saw that audio systems can have more than one output and various file formats.For the second and third chapter we get started with FMOD, audio playback and audio control. First we get an overview of FMOD and how to set up the Programmer's API with a Visual Studio project. Once that is setup we are ready to start! We learn to create and manage the FMOD audio system, how to load sounds both for streaming and into memory and then how to play them. Next we get into checking for errors to make sure everything is running as it should. Finally we're ready to create our own audio manager class. Now that we can load and play audio files the author goes into how to ways in which we can control the playback. The author then expands on our audio manager class after going over how to control the playback, volume, pitch, panning and channel grouping.Next in the fourth chapter the author gets into some more advanced features. We start off with 3D audio learning positional audio dealing with different audio soucres coming from specific locations. The author then explains how we simulate how the audio interacts with the environment through a technique called reverberation. Naturally most environments aren't empty so we get into how to handle obstruction and occlusion from objects. The last couple of pages in this section go over DSP effects(digital signal processing) giving us two quick samples.In the fifth chapter we get to learn about FMOD Designer and how to use sound events vs. audio files like we have been using. We start off learning to create simple events and how to avoid repetitive sound effects. The author goes over a few examples: a footstep sound loop, breaking glass sound effect and and an ambient track of singing birds. We then move on to multi-track events, these are a significantly more powerful. Expanding on our previous examples we make the footstep loop interactive allowing it to be more versatile. The singing birds turns into a complex forest with different animals that can also change based on the time of day in your simulation. I thought these were some pretty cool and useful examples that show off how powerful this tool really is.The fourth and fifth chapters contain code snippets but there is no demo project in the downloadable source code. As this book is a getting started guide and these chapters cover more advanced topics i'm okay with this. Unfortunately there is a shortage of books covering audio for games, but it would be nice to have these topics covered in more detail in a later book.Finally in the last chapter we dive deep into the low-level audio. Here we work with the bits and bytes of audio data and learn to code much of what FMOD already does for us. We will learn to load a WAV file, play and control the audio data, implement a basic delay effect and synthesize some basic sound waves. Although FMOD already handles everything we recreate in this chapter its a great learning experience to take a look at the underpinnings and see how they work and would be implemented.All of the source code compiled cleanly and ran as expected. You'll have to download FMOD Ex and SFML yourself. The author uses Visual Studio 2010. and make sure the project properties are set up (Additional Include Directories, Lib and Post-Build Event to copy the dll's to your output directory).This book was pretty short and to the point. It was easy to read, contained good examples and covers exactly what you would expect when reading the title. If you're looking to add some audio to your game and aren't already using an engine or framework that already has audio functionality included I would recommend this book as a great starting point.

Amazon Customer Mar 04, 2018

I would recommend this book as the best place for any beginner to start learning about audio programming. I have other books on audio programming, but this one is the most clear and concise allowing for quick integration into your software.

A.K. Nov 04, 2013

This is an introductory book for [intermediate] C++ developers who want to start in audio programming, mainly using FMOD. The author starts by presenting some universal audio concepts in the first chapter such as volume, pitch, frequency, bit depth and audio file formats. Then he introduces FMOD and explains how to add it to a [Visual Studio C++] project, initialize FMOD, load/stream/play sounds, and check for errors. After this FMOD introduction, there is a project to build a simple C++ class audio manager. In Chapter 3, the author expands the manager to include audio control (playback, volume, pitch, panning, channel grouping).With the audio basics covered, the author explains 3D audio and how to work with positional audio, reverb and effects in FMOD. When working with positional audio, the developer must deal with occlusion and obstacles that affect the way audio is perceived by the player. This is a topic that could be further explored by the author, as it is touched in a couple of pages only. The same goes for DSP effects, which is presented in the last 3 pages of the same 3D audio chapter.The FMOD Designer tool is also introduced, which is a great tool from Firelight Technologies (developer of FMOD) for those who are more design-oriented. The author explains how to create simple sound events (such as footsteps and breaking glass SFX), multi-track events (e.g. interactive footsteps, car engine) and interactive music, and how to call these via code. For bigger projects or projects that need something more than basic audio control, this tool is a must.The final chapter involves low-level audio programming, i.e. how to work with the bytes of a digital sound file - loading, playbacking, changing properties, etc. Even though it still uses FMOD for audio control, the reader gets an 'under the hood' insight of the higher level audio APIs.At ~100 pages, this is a good introductory book for developers who are not familiar with audio programming, especially since there are not many books on the topic (there are some that focus on DirectSound/XACT programming, but these technologies seems to be pretty much dead -or are dying- and are MS-only). It is targeted at C++, but developers from other languages (e.g. C#) might benefit from the book as well, as FMOD supports other languages. The author's decision on FMOD is a good one too: FMOD is a multi-platform technology, supports many audio formats, and has been adopted by many successful games, companies and game engines (e.g. Unity, UE3). Previously I worked on a multi-platform game using FMOD for audio and the results were very nice.To get you started with audio programming, I think the contents and length of the book are OK, although the author could go deeper into the 3D audio and DSP effects section (and include 3D audio code in the audio manager as well; source-code is provided for chapters 2, 3 and 6 only).It is worth mentioning that FMOD Studio is not covered in the book, and for anything that is not audio-related (window, render and input management), the author uses SFML (Simple and Fast Multimedia Library).I would like to see another book from the author/publisher that deals with more advanced audio programming, such as more details on how to work with 3D audio (and the implications associated with it), real-time DSP effects, dynamic audio, and performance. Would also be good to see a project dealing with FMOD Designer (or FMOD Studio) and code, and not just examples.

Getting Started with C++ Audio Programming for Game Development: Written specifically to help C++ developers add audio to their games from scratch, this book gives a clear introduction to the concepts and practical application of audio programming using the FMOD library and toolkit.

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