[gst-devel] Game-style audio

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller]

Hi Steve,
We do not have a very long history of use in games for sound effects
etc, but it is an area we would love to know we cover well. But if you
are not prepared to debug any issues then SDL as Michal mentions is
probably a safer choice.

The only game use I know of currently is gnome-games which uses
GStreamer for its sounds. You find the code here:
http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gnome-games/trunk/libgames-support/games-sound.c

Christian

On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 11:52 -0700, Steve Fink wrote:
> [apologies if this has been asked before. I cannot access the list archives.]
> 
> I'm looking at using gstreamer for managing the audio and video of my
> application, and so far I'm really liking it. Everything works about
> the way I would hope that it would. But I'm wondering how well-suited
> it is to non-streaming audio, as you'd find in (for example) a game.
> My application is not quite a game, most of the time, but it has
> similar needs.
> 
> Specifically, I want to be able to fire off up to a dozen or two
> simultaneous short audio clips. I want to be able to:
> 
>  - receive a notification when each individual clip is done
>  - be able to dynamically envelope the volume and possibly other
> properties of each clip, separately
>  - when a new audio clip is fired and there are already N playing, I
> want to intelligently choose another clip to kill off. That will
> normally be the oldest, but I might want to group them so that a new
> clip kills the oldest within its group only.
>  - be able to query the current progress of each sound (or at least
> receive events when various tags within the clips are reached), and be
> able to associate it with the appropriate sound
> 
> gstreamer seems great for doing all of the above for one or a small
> fixed number of simultaneous audio streams, but I'm unclear as to the
> best approach for managing a varying number of clips all firing off at
> different times. Should I:
> 
>  1. Do it all externally to gstreamer, and produce a single pre-mixed
> audio stream?
>  2. Create/destroy a gstreamer pipeline for each instance?
>  3. Keep some fixed maximum number of pipelines alive and rolling at
> all times, and let them play silence when they're not being used?
>  4. Some combination or other option?
> 
> #3 seems the nicest, but I can't use gstreamer's end-of-stream events,
> and I have to keep a bunch of processing pipelines alive and using
> resources all the time even when I'm not playing anything. I need
> low-latency sound (it's triggered in response to user events, and
> cannot be predicted in advance) -- would it be fast enough to keep the
> silent pipelines paused when inactive, and start them playing when the
> trigger happens? I'll probably try it to see, but I'm wondering if
> state changes are generally regarded as a bad idea from a latency
> perspective.
> 
> At some point, I'd also like to try out some dynamic mixing volume
> control (eg if an important clip is triggered, then drop everything
> else down to make sure it's heard, then gradually bring them back up
> again). What plugins should I be looking at for this or any other
> part?
> 
> Thanks,
> Steve
> 
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