Building XNA Games- P9: I would like to acknowledge John Sedlak, who saved this book from certain doom, as well as all of the great guys in the XNA community and Microsoft XNA team, who helped me with all of my stupid programming questions. (That is actually the term used—“stupid programming question”—and it is a question that one should not have to ask if one has been approached to write a book about the subject.) | 228 CHAPTER 8 XACT AUDIO RUMBLE AND MORE Figure 8-11. The reverb after removing the peaking part For some final cleanup we quiet the duplicate track a little by selecting Effect Amplify and entering a negative value of -5 clip off the remaining 5 seconds of silence and apply a Cross Fade Out to the trailing bit. Figure 8-12 shows the final 50-cal sound for our game. Figure 8-12. 50-cal the final product This should give you an idea of the basic functions that you can accomplish with Audacity and a good idea of how to collect and process audio. It will become more important to understand the workflow of creating a piece of audio as you develop your own games. In summary the important audio we ended up with is as follows Gunshot Hit An assortment of crunching and splatter sounds CHAPTER 8 XACT AUDIO RUMBLE AND MORE 229 We ll use the crunches and splatters to add some flavor to our combat audio. Save all of the audio files as .wav files in ZombieSmashers Content sfx. Now let s get all of this set up in XACT Adding Audio to the Game With our audio files ready we can now add sounds to the game. As you saw in Chapter 2 we use XACT for this task. XACT organizes sound in a hierarchical manner. You don t need to be intimately familiar with the layout but it helps to have a vague idea of what s going on Waves are raw audio. A wave bank is a collection of wave .wav files that could be used in a game. Sounds are composed of tracks that play simultaneously. Tracks contain events. Events can among other things play waves. A sound bank is the use of files in the wave bank and can apply certain properties to sound files. Cues play sounds. Cues are what you tell your audio engine to play from within your game. Cues have their own properties that can be applied to sounds. To look at it from the application end of things we ll be telling our audio engine to play a cue which will play a sound which will play its tracks which will fire their events which will play waves. There s going
