Student Game Dev Part 21 - Background music

Soan

New Zealand194 Posts

April 18 2014 21:59 GMT

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This Week
Hello again TeamLiquid! Welcome back to my blog about the development of The Adventures of Sam the Pirate, the 2D platformer I'm creating as the final game project for my Bachelor of Software Engineering degree. Last week I talked about implementing the score and displaying it. I'll also talk about a decision I made regarding the number of levels, and have another new piece of music. This week I'll be talking about implementing FModto play background music. Bit of a shorter blog this week, as I've been looking for a new place to live, and shifting into some temporary accommodation in the mean time. So not as much time to work on the game as I would like, but that's real life for you I suppose. It's also Easter weekend!

Background Music
Integrating FMods low level api turned out to be really easy. Once it had been installed, I shifted the header, library, and dll files over into my project, so if I was to rebuild it on a different machine it will all just work, and took a look at the included example files on how to play sounds. Initializing FMod was only a few lines of code.

FMOD::System* system = 0;
FMOD::System_Create(&system);
UInt32 version = 0;
system->getVersion(&version);
if (version < FMOD_VERSION)
{
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;// incompatible version, throw an error
}
void* extraDriverData = 0;
system->init(32, FMOD_INIT_NORMAL, extraDriverData);

Once that was done, I could start playing sounds with only a couple more lines of code. There's some further error checking being done, but I've left it out of this example block of code. The function calls return an FMOD_RESULT, which can be checked to see if it is ok, and if not, there is another function to get what the error is.

Playing background music is similarly easy. Create the sound in FMod, then play the sound. Rather than load the music directly into memory, the file is being streamed as it is played.

Music
New piece of music this week, a piece I'm considering for the cave area of the game.

If you're interested in more music from the artist, he has a website over at Eternal Vibration that you can check out.

What's next?
Next week I'll get sound effects working, and start on a level selection screen. Next week is a short week as well, two public holidays!

Keep up to date!
Be sure to follow me on Twitter, and like the Facebook page to stay up to date on future content and blog posts when they happen. If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask, either through Twitter or Facebook! You can also check out the blog, previous posts, screenshots and videos over at my site.

Assault_1

Canada1950 Posts

April 19 2014 00:56 GMT

I was reading your physics sections and it reminded me of a project I did for my graphics course at university. A physics-based bouncy ball game, in C++/opengl. I have a math/physics background and implemented sphere-sphere, sphere-box, and sphere-inclined box collisions, it took a fairly long time. The whole project took about 100 hours.

I have quite an interest in simulating physics on a computer, I wish I knew more about it. Anyway I had trouble with the marble touching two objects at the same time, it would eventually sink into one of them and I spent a few hours trying to fix it but had to move on to other stuff. In the vid above I conveniently spaced everything far apart enough so you can never touch two objects. I was trying to research this kind of stuff but there didn't seem to be any great sources on it.. like everyone keeps their solutions to themself.

If I had another 100 hours I'd try to implement a squishy ball like this:

Deranes

Germany75 Posts

April 20 2014 18:42 GMT

On April 19 2014 09:56 Assault_1 wrote:
Anyway I had trouble with the marble touching two objects at the same time, it would eventually sink into one of them and I spent a few hours trying to fix it but had to move on to other stuff.

Richard Tonge from NVIDEA talked about how to solve this at GDC 2013. Here is a link to the pdf of the presentation:
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1018160/Physics-for-Game
It starts on page 38 in the pdf, or page 36 if you follow the numbers printed on the pages.

Assault_1

Canada1950 Posts

April 21 2014 02:44 GMT

On April 21 2014 03:42 Deranes wrote:

Show nested quote +

wow, that got pretty complex! Very cool, howcome nvidia gives away its secrets though, I thought this is private R&D stuff?
Also do you think this would've been possible to implement in 100 or so hours?

Deranes

Germany75 Posts

April 21 2014 13:42 GMT

On April 21 2014 11:44 Assault_1 wrote:
wow, that got pretty complex! Very cool, howcome nvidia gives away its secrets though, I thought this is private R&D stuff?

This is just me guessing but heres my thoughts. By telling game programmers how to make a rigid body contact solver that runs efficiently in parallell. Then the physics in their games are going to be able to handle more collisions than before, using the 4 or so cores on the CPU. But the GPU can run waaay more collisions in parallel using it's compute shader than the CPU can. So the physics might start being implemented on the GPU instead in more games. Then some gamers will have to upgrade their graphics cards in order to run the game. Which makes nvidea money since they sell graphics cards.

On April 21 2014 11:44 Assault_1 wrote:
Also do you think this would've been possible to implement in 100 or so hours?

I haven't done it myself yet but I have a hunch that it should be easy to implemented a physics engine using those ideas in less than 100 hours.

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