Re: [orca-list] Wine apps in Orca?

[Thomas Ward <thomasward1978 gmail com>]

Hi Vojta,

On 6/28/12, VojtÄch PolÃÅek <krecoun gmail com> wrote:
> 1. I understand that sounds and music all come for a price, especiall
> music. I think that sounds are a bit easier to find, i mean legal ways
> now, but it depends on required quality and luck.

Well, it all depends on the sound library and of course how the sounds
are being used. Generally if a game developer licenses their sounds
through Sound Dogs or similar there are royalty fees involved in
acquiring sounds for a commercial game. Usually do to copyrights its
technically not legal to simply download sounds for free and resell
them for a game therefore there are royalty fees involved in using
them. If they are to be used in an open source project it doesn't cost
as much to acquire the sounds for use, but there usually is still some
fees attached. After all, the sound engineers are in the business to
make money and selling sound effects is how they do it.

> But how do developers of regular games get their funding? They need
> sounds as well, don't they?

Yes, they do, and by regular games I believe you mean mainstream
games. A lot depends on if the game is freeware, shareware, open
source, or commercial. Cost greatly depends on the end user license
being used, and I'll just start by stating the obvious. Commercial
game developers pay for their sounds and music from places like Sound
Dogs, Sound Ideas, and other big name sound resellers and recover the
cost through sales. If the sounds are for a freeware or open source
project they often times can license the sounds for less money since
they aren't being used commercially. Then, some people are willing to
create custom sounds for free.

> 2. I am writing a simple game my self, as Tom stated, it is a "bop it"
> style game with some twists. My dream is to write some kind of sudoku
> game, but it is true that these games don't require 3D sounds, so this
is a bit different position.

Yes, it is a totally different kettle of fish in terms of choice of
API for a game developer. For something simple like BopIt SDL is fine
because you don't need the kinds of advanced features of DirectX
because all you need is basic keyboard input and audio output. SDL can
handle that just fine. It is things like force feedback racing wheel
support, advanced audio output, and things like that where SDL really
falls short and is an inferior API for game development. Sorry, but
true.

> Pygame offers some sound positioning, as we can see in Sound
> RTS, I don't know what FMOD Ex  offers.

Pygame is a Python wrapper for SDL and to be honest it is pretty
limited in what it can do. In games like SoundRTS positioning is
simply handled by raising and lowering the volume for the left and
right stereo channels. Basically, it is a simple stereo pan effect,
but you don't have full 3d surround sound support like you would get
with OpenAL, FMOD Ex, etc. Pygame also lacks real time DSP effects
such as pitch, echo, low/high pass filters, and so on. In a game like
SoundRTS that doesn't really matter, but if someone wanted to port
something like Shades of Doom to Linux they'd find Pygame woefully
lacking in features compared to Microsoft's DirectX.

Firelight's FMOD Ex API is a 3d audio library on par with Microsoft's
DirectSound or XAudio2 APIs. It includes several real time DSP effects
including: 3d surround sound positioning, 2d stereo  panning, pitch,
echo, low/high pass filters, chorus, etc. The ability to load from a
number of audio formats including wav, ogg, mp3, wma, etc. The ability
to stream multiple sound or music sources at once. In short, FMOD is
the cat's meow  when it comes to audio libraries for Linux. It is free
for open source projects, but there are royalty fees involved in
commercial games.

For the types of games I am creating such as FPS, side-scrollers, and
real time racing simulations the added features of FMOD Ex makes a
huge difference in end user experience. If you speed up  in Raceway
you would expect the pitch of the engine to increase in pitch. If you
are walking in an empty tomb you would expect some echo as you
approach the walls. FMOD can do that, but SDL Mixer really can't.

> 3. I have managed to run Topspeed under Wine, with some glitches. But
> you can try it.

I have tried it. Its those glitches which makes Wine so unsatisfactory
for a gaming platform. Especially, when I can run a virtual machine
with XP and not get those glitches.

Cheers!