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Is xact that bad?

by Dan Pascal · in Torque X Platformer Kit · 07/10/2007 (7:22 pm) · 1 replies

First of all, love the kit- great work

after watching/reading some of the xact tutorials, I was excited about all the cool audio functionality...
is that just a dream?

the soundManager looks like quite a peice of work, I'm guessing xact was a real briotche

for a novice programmer: is it worth tackling xact itself to try and use it's crossfading and events functionality etc.., or should I just stay away from it.
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Torque Owner Thomas Buscaglia
#1
07/10/2007 (8:37 pm)
A lot of people dish on XACT, but it does have some nice functionality. It's just not easy to work with. For example, if you find that you want to reorganize the wave banks for your game for whatever reason, expect to spend several hours rebuilding your sound banks and wave banks from scratch. There were a lot of good ideas put into it, but some of the implementation in terms of interface and flexibility leaves a lot to be desired.

The sound manager is something that might get polished up a bit and pulled into the engine in the near future. One of the biggest pains in dealing with sounds in XNA is that you have to keep references to your sound cues around or your sounds will get garbage collected while they're playing, causing them to stop abruptly before they're done. The sound manager is handy because it will automatically keep references to sound cues around and dispose them (after they finish playing) at a steady rate as you use it so you don't get the typical GC hitches caused by a ton of objects getting GC'd at the same time.

It's also just a nice way to handle your sound banks. For example, in the platformer demo there were several sound banks with mostly the same sounds, but different step sounds. By naming the cues the same in the different sound banks we were able to allow the dragon to request a sound called "step" and play a different sound based on what sound bank was currently active on him.

That said, XACT does have some nice features. RPC's aren't too painful to work with and the automatic volume and pitch variation stuff is very handy.