Game Audio Programming [With CDROM]

by James Boer

Game Audio Programming is a comprehensive guide to interactive audio programming for the Microsoft Windows (r) platform. Written for C++ programmers implementing an audio system for an entertainment... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1584502452
• ISBN13: 9781584502456
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Charles River Media
• Length: 640 Pages
• Weight: 2.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A great resource

For anyone actually doing practical audio programming for a game, this book is a great resource. No, it doesn't dig into academic minutia such as implementing your own software mixer, or explaining FFTs or writing custom DSPs, as those topics fall outside the realm of game programming (yes, audio compression uses these items, but no one writes their own audio compression codecs anymore, especially with good open-source alternatives available). Modern audio programming is all about taking advantage of hardware acceleration, and that means using APIs such as DirectX that can do this. The book is quite specialized, but digs into the APIs and gives a lot of good advice on practical implementation that you won't find anywhere else.It also contains a good deal of the meat and potatoes of game audio programming, such as developing and interactive music system, or creating compelling dynamic soundscapes. The APIs are a big part of that, but not the only part, as a good portion of the book is devoted to these higher-level programming concepts.I'd highly recommend this book to any game developer who needs to implement (or improve) an audio engine for their Windows PC game. It will give you a big head start, with lots of working source code to play with.

Good for learning about API, not audio prgramming

I agree with a previous reviewer that this book is dedicated to developing a high to mid level audio engine based on DirectSound and DirectMusic. This book is not about audio programming from scratch. It doesn't give any algorithms for implementing your own 3D audio engine. It does give pretty good explanation of the I3DL2 spec (but this can be gleaned from the AISIG site. It also has a good explanation of Occlusion and Obstruction.