Escape – Group 4 – Week 5 – Sound Manager

In an earlier meeting with the advising 3rd year student, it was suggested that I shift my focus off the main menu and start working on something with higher priority. “Sound manager” was on the list in the backlog and as lead sound designer, I chose to start work on it.

To make my job easier, I searched the internet for existing open source sound managers. There were only two existing managers, strange considering you’d find many open source managers for example: sprite-, object-, level- and so on.
The one I chose was apparently for an earlier version of SFML and I was having issues converting it to the current version. I posted a thread in SFML’s official forums, later that evening I received my first answer:
“The functionality that you want to implement is already provided by SFML…”

His argument was that SFML was already designed in such a way that it wasn’t necessary to have a sound manager. The day after, I solved the issues myself and got the manager to work. Was he right though? It took about a week to get manager to work, was it worth it?

Granted, now that the sound manager is in place, it’s quicker to load sound files and requires less code. But it saves about 2 minutes of time comparing to loading sound files the usual way in SFML. In the long run, I may have wasted more time than saving it for the project. I could’ve focused on other elements or finished work on the main menu.

However, this may have allowed us to save disc memory when launching the game. Instead of having to load sound files in every separate state of the game, every same sound file can now be accessed in every state from the same source. This also makes our game’s file size smaller. It may have helped  optimize the game.

It may have been a slight waste of time, but it also may have been worth it to make our game more functional and stable. What do you think?

Work on the main menu has been resumed and hopefully the options tab will be fully functional within the next week. So far, I’ve only worked on the visual functionality (such as working sliders to control sound-, music- and gamma-levels). Also need to consider to add a fullscreen option after seeing a certain “psychotic” person, react to the lack of that option in earlier projects…

Here’s a demonstration of what I’ve accomplished so far (including sound manager):