Summary

Even without any special effects, 3-D sounds added to an application can be impressive. This chapter, along with the Rumpus sample, explained all that you need to know to add 3-D sound to your application. Once you have grasped the concept of a listener and sound effects, each with their own position, velocity, and orientation vectors, you can see how closely 3-D sound maps to 3-D graphics. For the sake of efficiency, it is important to consider the vector requirements of 3-D sound when you are designing the classes and structures that you are going to use for your graphics objects.

The downside to creating 3-D sounds with the DirectSound SDK is the occasional tendency of DirectSound to produce sound glitches. The immediate and deferred settings are one tool that will help you to minimize this characteristic.

In just three chapters, we have already covered one-, two-, and three-dimensional sound, and examined tools that test many of the features of DirectSound. The next chapter starts to tackle the application of special effects.