3D Sound System

[SymSoundSol]

Just read your tutorial and looking to download everything.   I'm very new at this, and I have tons of ques.  Your tutorial was great, though, and has given me some confidence to get started.

To start:
How does 3D sound System handle spatialization.  Is it just pan and volume, or can we add some other parameters (such as interaural time delay)?  What about reflections off of buildings in the game?

Also, is there a capability of transmitting live sound into Sound System?


Thanks for the help.
   

[Paul]

In its basic form, SoundSystem uses only pan and volume for spatialization.  Additionally, there is a method for setting a source's pitch, which could be used for the "doppler effect" (it would require one to write an algorithm for calculating the pitch based on relative velocity).  There are no direct methods for time delay or reflections, so effects like these must be written by the developer.

For your second question, there are methods for feeding in raw audio data to a streaming source, which could be used to play live sound.  It is a little finniky when using OpenAL, because that library has problems if there are "gaps" in the data flow (can be corrected by feeding "silence" to the source when there is no data available).  These methods are fairly new, so I haven't gotten around to writing about them in the tutorial yet.

--EDIT--
It should also be possible to play live sound by creating a simple streaming source from a URL to a live audio stream.  One benefit of this method is that your data wouldn't necessarly have to be raw PCM data - you would simply use the proper codec for whatever format the audio data was streaming in.  From a SoundSystem standpoint, this would probably be a lot easier to do than the above method, but it would require some research to determine how to set up a live audio feed in the first place (which is something you would probably have to figure out either way).