in celebration of middleware
being a bit reflective in the wake of my recent birthday, i’ve been looking back and taking stock. not about the choices i’ve made in this life or anything heady like that. but at stuff like this.
what the hell is that, you ask? that, my friends, is audio implementation in the era before FMOD or Wwise. that…is Windows “notepad” as middleware. this is the file that controlled all the audio in Kesmai’s BattleTech 3025, our only “tool” for talking to the Miles Sound System underneath it.
go ahead, read through it and try and make some sense of it. it took me a minute too, and i came up with the damn thing (though it *was* a decade ago). let’s see what high-powered functionality we managed to drive with our text editor…
- various sound object definitions: single sounds, random sound groups, and start-loop-stops.
- sound object parameters that could have discrete values or value ranges set, including: sample rate, volume, pan, and offset time.
- attenuation distances.
- priority groups, and their sound cutoff behaviors (new overrides old vs. old trumps new).
- meta-sounds that could reference one or more of the above and override their parameters (ie crude scripting).
- a change log! haha.
of course all this stuff is in any decent audio middleware package these days. but i thought it was pretty spiffy at the time. DIY, BITCHES!
