The magic of Sound

Research

While a game can be great without sound, there is something magical within sounds that fill the athmosphere. Which is somewhat needed to give that stillful and lonely feeling that our game needs. With this motivation in mind I set out to create something that could handle all the different sounds in our game in a reasonable fashion.

The thought that came to mind where that we do not want to load the same sound file several time.

To solve this I first checked SFML:s documentation for Sound and Music, to get an understanding of how much support they have for sound and music. They turned out to handle Audio much the same way as they handle Sprites, and if you do not know how they handle Sprites you can read up on it here: http://www.sfml-dev.org/tutorials/2.1/graphics-sprite.php. With one important rule, the Soundbuffer that you attach to the Sound object need to exist as long as you want to use the Sound object, which is another thing that the SoundManager is needed for. To control the lifetime of the SoundBuffers.

When I knew this, it was an easy decision to make the SoundManager much the same way as I did our SpriteManager.

Overview – Initalise and Load

* Initalise() – Within the red fields you see the Initialise() function, which has the purpose of setting the path to the directory (giving the folder which contains the audio files).

* Load() – Within the turqouise fields is the definition and declartion of the Load() function, which is the main part of the SoundManager:s purpose. To load a specific file and returning a soundbuffer pointer, which in turn will be used by the entities to create sounds. Inside the light blue field is the check if the file has already been loaded, more on the loading in the next section. If it is already loaded it will be loaded into a SoundBuffer pointer, as seen in the purple box. This SoundBuffer pointer is then returned to the part of the code that called for the function.

Overview – LoadImage and Cleanup

* LoadImage() – The pink boxes contain the definition and declaration of the LoadImage() function, which sole objective is to load a sound file into a sf::SoundBuffer and insert that in the dynamic array of Soundbuffers. This is achieved by first setting a complete file path, Cyan box, and then creating a local SoundBuffer pointer to which you use the “LoadFromFile()” function that is built into SFML, the Grey box. The next step is to make sure the file was actually loaded, the Yellow box, with a simple check if the pointer was nullified or not, and if it is nullified you return false (since the file could not be loaded). The last step is to insert the SoundBuffer in the dynamic array and then return true, the blue box.

* Cleanup() – The black box is the destruction of the class, this is where the dynamic array is cleared and all the pointers are deleted and set to nullptr. All this is done in the brown box. It iterates through the entire array and delete the pointers one by one and sets them to nullptr. After this the only thing left is to use the “Clear()” function to the std::map to reset the dynamic array.

Then voilà a functioning SoundManager.