Today I got my license for the FMOD sound library [ http://www.fmod.org ] this is the 3rd sound library I have implemented into the game. I had DirectSound implemented before moving to OpenAL. OpenAL is alright but it's really not as "polished" and feature-full as I prefer lib to be [though the price was right ;-)]. FMOD is packed to the hilt with features so I'm glad to be making the switch, it looks to be a very interesting library.
The game engine's interfacing with the sound library is totally obfuscated, so it's relativly trivial for me to swap out sound libs. Though I'm going to spend some time on this one learning the ins and outs of the library and taking full advantage of it [ I'm really interested in the "geometry api" where you can feed your game world's geometry into the sound lib which would be ideal for buildings ].
Anyways, the main reason I went with FMOD was it's native support of shoutcast/icecast/http streaming radio. The client will pull down the list of radio stations from my webserver when the user starts the game. I'm not going to have a full shoutcast station browser / etc...though that would be cool I havn't the slightest idea where to start to implement it.
I'm going to support 12 stations each with different types of music.
Here is my work-in-progress of the in-game radio player...
The large section in the middle will be where the radio stations will be, the top part will scroll the current playing song, and the area in the middle of the two is for visualization of the current waveform [assuming FMOD provides a way for me to get this data, I havn't checked yet].
Each radio station type has it's own logo...
Let me know if I left out a genre...I can always add more stations.
The user will 'roll' through these based on the mouses' position...I'm not going to have a scroll bar. This should create a nice smooth effect.
Ok well now that this artwork stuff is done I'm going to implement FMOD into the engine and get these radio stations working in the game. Should have some nice progress tommorow.
Also, it looks like I'm getting close to joining the "100k journal views" club. Awesome, I appreciate the readership.
- Dan
I liked the way GTA:SA handled it. Basically, one could create shortcuts in a special folder to the places where one has stored some music files in the MP3, OGG or WAV format. Then, GTA:SA would scan the referenced folders and play the music files when the "User Radio Station" was chosen.