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 |   gdunbar GDNet+
Member since: 2/22/2006 From: Mill Valley, CA | 
Posted - 10/2/2009 4:27:32 PM | A couple of updates on the game engine. First, I added support for footstep sounds and ambient audio. One of the critiques that I got from the To The World Tree demo (http://www.prankster.com/ttwt) was that the game was virtually silent. I'm a little resistant to having a full background music track, but I can appreciate that some sound can help to add to the atmosphere.
The support I added is very basic indeed; when someone in your party is walking, I play a little loop of footstep sounds. And different areas in a level can have a little background loop that they play. So, for instance, if your party is walking through a mountain pass, the game can play a little loop of a wind sound.
I used audiere (http://audiere.sourceforge.net/) to provide the audio support, basically because the API is dirt simple to use, and that's what I wanted. It works well enough, though I am a little disappointed with the performance of MP3 playback; it introduced a little glitch in the game when I used an MP3 file. No big deal; I'll just use WAV files for the small audio that I have, but just a little warning.
Hard to provide a screenshot for audio, but here you can see my test character standing next to a fire, which does indeed play a little burning sound effect:
Second, I added support for what I call party chatter. Every 5 seconds or so, the game calls a "heartbeat" script on a randomly selected party member. This script is intended to allow party members to interact, unprompted, with the player or even other party members. So, if party members don't like the actions the player is taking, or don't like each other, or whatever, they can have a little conversation (or anything else that the scripting engine supports). In this screenshot, the honest Grumpy has gotten so fed up with the player that he is leaving the party altogether:
Next up, I'm working on some last little tweaks to the RPG system, followed by implementing a little more functionality in the AI system.
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