Game Engine Architecture

822 15. You Mean There’s More?

signers, voice actors, and composers who work so hard to add that all-too-

critical fourth dimension to the virtual game world. And yet, sadly, the same

thing has happened in this book—I am out of room and out of time, so a full

treatment of audio will have to wait until the second edition. (In keeping with

a long and painfully unfortunate tradition in game development, once again

audio gets the shaft !)

Thankfully, a number of other books and online resources do provide a

wealth of information on audio development. First off , I recommend reading

the documentation for Microsoft ’s XACT sound authoring tool and runtime

API, located on the MSDN website under XACT: Tutorials and Samples (htt p://

msdn.microsoft .com/en-us/library/bb172329(VS.85).aspx). XACT supports

virtually every audio feature the average game programmer would want, and

its documentation is quite easy to digest. The Game Programming Gems book

series also includes a plethora of articles on audio—see [7] Section 6 and [40]

Section 6.

15.1.2. Movie Player

Most games include a movie player for displaying prerendered movies, also

known as full-motion video (FMV). The basic components of the movie player

are an interface to the streaming fi le I/O system (see Section 6.1.3), a codec to

decode the compressed video stream, and some form of synchronization with

the audio playback system for the sound track.

A number of diff erent video encoding standards and corresponding

codecs are available, each one suited to a particular type of application. For

example, video CDs (VCD) and DVDs use MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 (H.262)

codecs, respectively. The H.261 and H.263 standards are designed primar-

ily for online video conferencing applications. Games oft en use standards

like MPEG-4 part 2 (e.g., DivX ), MPEG-4 Part 10 / H.264, Windows Media

Video (WMV ), or Bink Video (a standard designed specifi cally for games by

Rad Game Tools, Inc.). See htt p://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_codec and

htt p://www.radgametools.com/bnkmain.htm for more information on video

codecs.

15.1.3. Multiplayer Networking

Although we have touched on a number of aspects of multiplayer game ar-

chitecture and networking (e.g., Sections 1.6.14, 7.7, and 14.8.3.2), this book’s

coverage of the topic is far from complete. For an in-depth treatment of multi-

player networking, see [3].