Managing hundreds and hundreds of sounds...

Java Sound & OpenAL
#1

My adventure game is starting to look OK; 8) I’m now starting to think that I would like to pull out all the stops and make it as pro lokoing as possible. I’m thinking about getting a few people together to play the characters and digitise all the dialogue so that the user has the chance to see voice and/or text.

Let’s say in my game I have 3 or 4 hundred sounds files. How would I manage these? What would be the best format? Would I be correct in thinking that the best way would be to have a single AudioClip object and dynamically change the file source everytime the PC or an NPC ‘says something’?

Also, I am not new to Java but am new to using sounds in Java - are there any memory leakage issues in Java, if I’m using such a vast amount of sounds files will I eventually run out of memory?

Thanks 8)

#2

Take a look at the apollo sound library (see appropriate thread also under javasound), there are mechanisms to play sounds in parallel and optimize resource consumption of audio clips through caching.
Now, the real question is no so much how many you have but how many sounds you want to play at once.

#3

Hi 8)

It won’t be too demanding on that front. There will be a constant background sound and then one piece of dialogue at a time… so 2!