How control Sound range that can be listen in XACT tool ?

Hi Henzrake,
Thank you for your post. Let me try to answer for two possible scenarios:

1) Suppose you want a single sound to get quieter with distance.

For this, you can create a runtime parameter control preset ("RPC Preset"), where you map the Distance variable to the sound's volume. Then associate the RPC preset with the sound by drag/dropping the sound onto it in the project tree. Now you can try it out in the RPC preset's edit window - there's a play button, and while the sound is playing, you can adjust the value of distance to simluate what the programmer will be doing in the game. If the sound is too short, there's a button that allows you to audition the sound as looping, so you don't need to keep retriggering it to hear how the volume changes with distance.

2) Suppose you want the same sound to actually play a different wave file (or different combination of wave files) based on distance. (For instance, we might have a car engine, and we want to really hear the pistons and gears at close proximity, then fade down to just the engine whir at greater distance, and eventually get to silence once we're a few hundred meters from the car).

For this, you actually do much the same thing - within a single sound, create two (or more) tracks, each one playing one of our waves. If we play it right now, we'll actually hear both elements at the same time at full volume. But if we create an RPC preset where Distance is driving the volume of the individual tracks (that's the "1::Volume" and "2::Volume", for the first and second tracks, and so on), and create curves that cause track 1 to have a steeper rolloff with distance than track 2, voila -- we have a car that responses more interactively with distance.

Of course, the disadvantage to this technique is that we're always playing all of the tracks (even those that might be muted at a much closer distance), so there's a bit more overhead. But for some sounds, that's something we're ready to accept since there will be times where the sound is close enough that it will need to use all of those voices anyway. If you instead really want to keep things to one voice, you might look at implementing things using the interactive audio cue feature of XACT, where you can smoothly transition between the various sound variations that comprise a cue based on a variable's current value.

Hope this helps, and please let me know if I've completely missed the target on your question!

-Scott

ScottSelfon-MSFT at 2007-8-31 >