irrKlang v0.1
Many interesting things are going on…
First of all, I got to know some interesting 3D developers who will (hopefully) write up some tutorials for the Xtra. Then, i need to iron out the DirectX8 renderer for the Irrlicht engine. Next, there has been some major updates on the Irrlicht site, with irrKlang, a 3D sound engine being the most interesting one.
Taken from its site:
IrrKlang’s current features are:
- Buffered and streamed audio playback, in 2D and 3D.
- High level resource management and autodetection: The engine can do everything for you. Just tell it to play a sound file, and it will load, cache and/or stream sound data for you automaticly, depending on what is best for performance and memory usage. But if you want to specify how the engine should handle this, you can do this as well.
- Extendable: Possibility to write own file format readers/decoders to extend the engine with it.
- Multi/Singlethreaded modes: The engine can run both multithreaded or singlethreaded in the same thread as your application, to make it possible to debug your application easier for example.
- Low level audio output manipulation: Possibility to alter any aspect of a playing sound like panning, volume and 3d position.
- Fast 3D audio on low end hardware: Because some low end audio hardware is not able to play 3D sounds without significant performance loss or some don’t support 3d audio buffers at all, irrKlang has a high performance 3d sound buffer emulator built-in, causing a sound experience nearly as it was a real 3d sound buffer.
- Advanced file reading support: irrKlang can read directly from compressed zip files, pak files, memory, and everywhere the Irrlicht Engine can. File reading function callback can be overwritten by the user, of course.
Squeezed by UPX, the irrKlang.dll is 208 Kb in size. Added to the Irrlicht Xtra, this would yield to a 3D and 3D sound Xtra under 1 Mb… 