Sound Effect Generation

I am currently trying to create various sound effects for the Truck Game.

It turns out its quite hard.

I have resorted to finding some sound effect libraries but I have also found a few very useful tools

http://thirdcog.eu/apps/cfxr

cfxr can generate random sounds that you can modify.

I have been finishing them off by using audacity.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net

Two great tools.

IPhone 5 Crazy

I've written very little recently due to being busy at work, but I just felt I had to say.

IPhone 5, yes thats crazy!!!

http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html

QT - Installation Tip - Can't start process install_name_tool

You may receive the following error when installing QT on the mac.

Can't start process install_name_tool

A simple fix can be found by 

1. > Opening up Xcode
2. > Preferences 
3. > Click install on command line tools

Now try re-installing QT.

Hope it helps.

Duncan.

Quick Batch Image resizing tip

Today I had quite a few photos to resize, but I really didn't want to have to do them manually.

After a bit of googling I found out that as normal the mac has some great utilities built in.

sips --resampleWidth 1500 *

Will resample all the pictures in your directory to have a maximum width of 1500 pixels.
You can choose an output directory, or I would just backup your images first just incase you want the originals.
The images end up with a reasonable file size to.

Sips can do all sorts of other thing to like converting file formats.

IOS Sound Conversion - Sound Effects - Audacity - afconvert

I'm currently in the process of creating some sound effects for my latest game.

I have been chopping them up in Audacity and saving them as wav files.

Being a little lazy I want a simple way of converting them into a format that runs well on the IOS devices.

So after saving my sound effects as .wav files.
I open up a terminal and change to the directory where your sound effects are located.

Then run the following command

afconvert -c 1 -b 32768 -d LEI16@11025 -f 'caff' TruckStart.wav TruckStart.caf

This will cut a 330KB wav file down to around 45KB.

-b is the bitrate

-d is the the little-endian integer 16-bit variant of linear PCM sound setting

the @11025 is the frequency range.

-c 1 converts the sound effect to single channel (mono)

And its converted to the caf format recommend by Apple.

Hope that is of some help.

Duncan.

JewelBlast3D Puzzle Game - IPhone - IPad - Free Game

Quite some time ago I built a free game called JewelBlast3D

JewelBlast3D Free IPhone Game

You can download it for free at 

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jewelblast3d/id507150133?mt=8

I'm quite amazed as it is still regularly getting some downloads on the App store.

It has made me think about the type of games people like on mobile platforms.
When I first had a gameboy quite a few years ago, I used to play for hours on Tetris and when I would go to sleep my dad would pick up the gameboy and play for hours!

I don't think much has changed since the early days people still like a good puzzle game that they can play over and over again.  In the end I would compete with my dad to get the highest score.

At some point I want to have a go at re-writting Jewel Blaster, hopefully I will get the time!

Duncan.

Cocos3d, Explosions in Monster Truck Trials

When a coin is collected initially we initially had a simple fade out.  This was to boring.

How would we create an explosion in cocos3d?  One concept would be to create clones of the original object and fire them off in various directions.

As we have the physics engine available, the following process was chosen.

• Spawn 10 new copies of the current one.
• Create a collision mask so that only explosion object can influence each other.
• Randomly change thier direction.
• Apply a little impulse.
• Create a fade out event that on completion removes the objects from the 3d and physics worlds.

The impulse alone would not be enough to make the objects go all over the place but as they are being spawned in the same locations the physics engine will make them react with each other as long as they have the same collision mask.

And here is the code.

float previous = node.rotation.y;

    for (int x = 0; x < 10; x++) {

    

        int random = [Helper getRandomNumberBetweenMin:1 andMax:10];

        CC3MeshNode* newCoin = [node copyAutoreleased];

        newCoin.uniformScale = 0.05 * random;

        newCoin.location = node.location;

        newCoin.quaternion = node.quaternion;

   

        [_activeWorld addChild:newCoin];

        [newCoin rotateBy:cc3v( previous + (80 * random), previous + (80 *  random), previous + (20 * random))];

        previous = newCoin.rotation.y;

        CC3PhysicsObject3D* explosionObject = [_physicsWorld createMyPhysicsObject:newCoin shape:boxShape2 mass:100 restitution:0.1 position:newCoin.location isStatic: NO : COL_PARTICLE : COL_PARTICLE];

        explosionObject.rigidBody->applyCentralImpulse(btVector3(5,5,0));

        CCFadeOut* fadeOut2 = [CCFadeOut actionWithDuration: random * 0.2];

        CCSequence *seq = [CCSequence actions:fadeOut2,   [CCCallFuncN actionWithTarget:explosionObject selector:@selector(remove)], nil];

        [explosionObject.node runAction:seq];    

       

    }    

I hope its of some use.


Duncan.