Chapter 4: Creating Game Audio Using Java

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Overview

Audio has historically been one of the most overlooked aspects of game development with good reason. In the early days of video games, simple bleeps and bloops were the only sound tools available to the game programmer. Whereas the emergence of digital audio gave new resources to game developers, consumer sound card sales were not driven by games to the same degree that graphics cards were. High-end audio cards existed for the connoisseur, but most consumers stuck with older audio cards, not realizing what they were missing. As the forward progress on graphic cards begins to slow, more attention is being paid to the audio component of games. The importance of quality audio in games continues to grow each year. Audio is a key element in maintaining cohesiveness and improving immersion in games and other forms of interactive entertainment.

A number of key technologies have come to the forefront in recent years that allow developers reasonable flexibility when developing the audio component of a game’s core engine. One such technology developed by Creative Labs, the Open Audio Library (OpenAL), can be reasonably thought of as the audio equivalent of the Open Graphics Library, better known as OpenGL. Where OpenGL provides extreme flexibility for rendering 3D graphics, OpenAL seeks to create flexible controls for audio programmers to use sound in three dimensions. OpenAL is currently implemented on all major PC platforms, including Windows, Macintosh, and Linux and has been featured as an audio component in games such as Unreal Tournament 2003 and Star Wars: Jedi Knight 2, Jedi Outcast.

This chapter gives a basic overview to the different options available to Java game developers regarding sound. The primary discussion will center on the fundamental usage of the new core game API sound component known as Java OpenAL Library (JOAL).