Actually, there are such games. And they are not only interesting for sight impaired people. Games based only on sound have the potential to become an own genre. It’s reasonable to give attention to sound based games since progress in sound rendering of game environments can have significant influence on mainstream titles. You can find a selection of sound based games here: www.audiogames.net

There is a particularly impressive Article about a young blind man, Terry Garrett, who completed Oddworld: Abe’s Exodus (noticed through RockPaperShotgun). He succeeded because most events in the game are accompanied by distinctive sound effects. Terry was able to make himself a picture of the game environment by listening to the acoustic clues. You can read the whole Article about Terry at Oddworld Inhabitants.

Please notice:
The current version is still far away from being complete or stable. There is much work to do and you will find many “TODO” comments while browsing the code. Even the panning features I mistakenly declared as finished in a previous post are not implemented, yet. However, if you encounter crashes bugs or other problems feel free to report them in the issue tracker.

You can download the current FLXMP version 0.1 (unstable!) from Google Code:
http://code.google.com/p/flxmp/downloads/list

There is also a public SVN access to the most recent upload.

A Documentation will follow soon, too.

Many problems in my previous attempt were caused by implicit type conversions and function call overheads. I also made some major architectual mistakes which made the whole project less controllable.

Now, everything runs smoothly and I’m happy with the results. However, not all features are implemented yet. Many XM-specific effects and stereo processing will follow. But this won’t have a big influence on performance, since the performance critical parts are basically done. I also was able to test the module player in my current game project and everythink went fine.

My special thanks go to Christian Corti and Richard Davey since I learned a lot from the FlodPro code. This is a quite decent chunk of work which I learned to respect and appreciate while working on my own module player.

Now it’s time for a small demo. The player below is playing the demo track “milk in veins” (by raina & . from the CoolPHat demo group) which comes with the Milkytracker release.

P.S.: I sign off for the next two months since this semester’s exams are drawing near.

However, I’ve learned a lot from this attempt. Sound processing can be really challanging. I’m sure I will reapproach this when there is more free time left.

• playing wave samples as notes (ok, that’s quite obvious)
• finetuning
• volume and panning control
• volume and panning envelopes
• instrument vibrato

I’ve added a quick little demo below. You can click on the keyboard picture below and use the (computer-) keyboard to play the notes. Basically, a ca. 1000 samples long 8-bit wave is being played through a bunch off effects resulting in the final instrument’s sound (and pitch). The file size is 17kB.

That’s nothing impressive yet, but it offers many possibilities.

Music and sound are the most file size bloating assets when making flash games. If you want your game to have a low file size, you need to get rid of >5MB mp3 files. So I decided to write an extended module player library for my game. The XM format is a tracker format introduced by Fast Tracker 2 by the demogroup Triton. This should keep the music files below 100kB. Above you see a screenshot of Milkytracker which is a Windows compatible Tracker supporting the XM format.

Oh… yeah, of course the library is still work in progress.

We had fun at the Nürburgring. It was a nice extended weekend with my girlfriend which featured the following:

• music
• lightshows
• a suprisingly good-humoured Jonathan Davis
• tents
• crowd
• rain
• mud
• more mud
• garbage
• cold wind
• drunken people
• more drunken people
• cooking coffee in the car
• canned ravioli
• unbroken glasses
  

We went there mainly for the music