sound, networking - suggestions?

zaneiel · Post by **zaneiel** » Wed Apr 19, 2006 5:36 am

Hey all,

I am brand new to Irrlicht. After searching through other engines and thinking i found the right one (TV3D) i got about 2 months into development and found the engine to be to limiting in what you can do with models and had to abandon my project! my search began yet again, bringing me to CrystalSpace and Irrlicht. CS is a sweet engine but way to complex for me to be bothered with, so thta leaves me with Irrlicht.

I fired up some of the samples and i was programming in minutes! i love this hting its easy to use like TV3D was but has alot more functionality.

With this post i am hoping to get some recomendations for sound and network api's that can be used in C++ or C#.

I am looking for a self contained library or api that dosen't depend on 32 other open source projects that 6 of them don't compile correcty

~

I have been looking at SDL for sound it seems prety easy to use. and looked into audiere but it now has 2 - 3 dependencies (although may still be worth it)

on the network thing, i could use directX but i would like my code to be cross platform even if you had to get .net framework for Linux or something.

Any ideas? thanks in advance for listening to my ramblings!

jam · Post by **jam** » Wed Apr 19, 2006 5:41 am

The Irrlicht Wiki lists several Network and Sound libraries you may wish to look at.

http://www.irrforge.org/index.php/Main_Page

zaneiel · Post by **zaneiel** » Wed Apr 19, 2006 6:02 am

Thanks Jam i'll check them out!

zaneiel · Post by **zaneiel** » Wed Apr 19, 2006 6:37 am

Thanks again for the link, i looked through and found hawkNL, looks promising! ~gota love forums!~

jam · Post by **jam** » Wed Apr 19, 2006 7:24 am

I've bookmarked the wiki as I have found all sorts of useful info on the site.

WhiteNoise · Post by **WhiteNoise** » Wed Apr 19, 2006 5:11 pm

I recommend RakNet. There's even a tutorial for using it with irrlicht if you want to get started.

Melancor · Post by **Melancor** » Tue May 02, 2006 11:36 am

Now that he has posted here, I have to tell you guys (in case you don't know him already) White Noise has made a series of rather professional plugins for Buzz Tracker
This compact, FREE and VERY FUNCTIONAL sound and music creation software is really well-made and well worth having on your HD if you have minimum experience with tracking/sequencing or synthesizers.

Combine it with GoldWave and Lame for encoding and you're ready to make your own electronic music.
Which brings me back to a question asked long ago in the BuzzTracker forum:
Wouldn't it be nice to have a .bmx player (.bmx=Buzz file format) to be included in a game/network environment? I will explain why.

We all know that audio sound has too much data unless ecoded to CELP or Speex which leaves you the equivalent of 1920's telephone sound. Good for TeamSpeak, but for music we need at least mp3 quality (1Mb/min)

In Buzz Tracker all music is calculated in real-time by software syntesizers (wav and mp3 streaming is also supported but that's not what I'm talking about), so we still need memory and cpu usage for those, BUT the actual music data is reduced to just a few kilobytes which allow control over a very versatile sound system. I don't know much about the regular sound APIs, but I have a feeling that they can't do much beyond playing prerecorded sound with a little reverb if that.

White Noise, maybe you can give me a clue?

bitplane · Post by **bitplane** » Wed May 03, 2006 1:05 am

you might want to check out protracker style mods for small but high quality in-game music, audiere supports them.
it doesn't look like buzz tracker can export to this format though, since (from what i can tell) its using custom mixers and filters. your best option for these is to encode them to ogg vorbis or something. protracker (popular in the 90s demo scene) had a limited instruction set so they are easy to emulate and widely supported nowadays. see http://modplug.com

Melancor · Post by **Melancor** » Thu May 04, 2006 1:37 pm

I 'm not sure about other sound trackers, but what really kicked me about Buzz was being able to modify each and every synth or effect parameter via music data. Only CUBase and FruityLoops had similar features as far as I know.

zenaku · Post by **zenaku** » Fri May 05, 2006 2:07 pm

Melancor wrote:Now that he has posted here, I have to tell you guys (in case you don't know him already) White Noise has made a series of rather professional plugins for Buzz Tracker
This compact, FREE and VERY FUNCTIONAL sound and music creation software is really well-made and well worth having on your HD if you have minimum experience with tracking/sequencing or synthesizers.

Combine it with GoldWave and Lame for encoding and you're ready to make your own electronic music.
Which brings me back to a question asked long ago in the BuzzTracker forum:
Wouldn't it be nice to have a .bmx player (.bmx=Buzz file format) to be included in a game/network environment? I will explain why.

We all know that audio sound has too much data unless ecoded to CELP or Speex which leaves you the equivalent of 1920's telephone sound. Good for TeamSpeak, but for music we need at least mp3 quality (1Mb/min)

In Buzz Tracker all music is calculated in real-time by software syntesizers (wav and mp3 streaming is also supported but that's not what I'm talking about), so we still need memory and cpu usage for those, BUT the actual music data is reduced to just a few kilobytes which allow control over a very versatile sound system. I don't know much about the regular sound APIs, but I have a feeling that they can't do much beyond playing prerecorded sound with a little reverb if that.

White Noise, maybe you can give me a clue?

I know enough about Irrlicht and enough about Buzz that I could probably hack together a simple .bmx player.

The problem is you are trading size for speed. Do you really want the CPU hit in a game engine?

Melancor · Post by **Melancor** » Fri May 05, 2006 3:26 pm

Good point. It's really not worth the effort unless one wishes to use it for more than a player. I thought of a sound based strategy game but it turned into something like the best ears win...
However, even a simple .bmx player would probably be appreciated by buzzers. If you (Zenaku) could provide that without going into too much hassle, that would surely be great

and worth presenting at the buzz forum

zenaku · Post by **zenaku** » Sun May 07, 2006 6:30 pm

Melancor wrote:Good point. It's really not worth the effort unless one wishes to use it for more than a player. I thought of a sound based strategy game but it turned into something like the best ears win...
However, even a simple .bmx player would probably be appreciated by buzzers. If you (Zenaku) could provide that without going into too much hassle, that would surely be great and worth presenting at the buzz forum

It's something that I would want to do but I know I will never have time to do. I'm still working on IrrLua

yourself · Post by **yourself** » Wed May 31, 2006 12:35 am

I just use FMOD 3 for the library and madtracker export to s3m for music... works great....