Sound

[kpreid]

There is only one critical requirement for sound:

• [ ] Add a platform-independent mechanism for world and UI elements to “emit” sound (as a sequence of events), which the desktop and web code can then feed into some API.

But then there are further tasks and open questions to add sound to the game:

• [ ] Decide how we are going to handle specific sounds, such as UI interactions and tool uses, in the all-is-cubes crate, minimizing bloat. Minimal set of recorded "click" noises? Pure synthesis? No concrete sound in the library, dependents must add their own?
• [ ] Ambient sound synthesis (wind noise, rustles, hums, etc.) driven by character environment in the same way as camera exposure is.
• [ ] Can we usefully synthesize sounds from block definitions? My predecessor project “Cubes” did that, but not well, but I know more about synthesis principles and techniques now. But it would probably still require material-properties hints to be not too incongruous.
• [ ] Perhaps a Universe should be able to contain recordings for custom SFX and background music.

[kpreid]

As of commit fde29b0d9e43cb64963efaf3630b8bee6088d5d5 there is very minimal sound support, intended to be just enough to be able to add further features incrementally. Actual sound output is desktop only, not web.

[kpreid]

One of the libraries I had my eye on was web-audio-api. I just took a second look at exactly what it says it does, and it does not provide a “direct” adapter to the real Web Audio API in browsers. But, assuming it does what it says well, that still means I can plan to use the Web Audio API paradigm (audio samples and tone generators passing through a series of filters, mixers, etc.) when planning out the audio synthesis and processing that All is Cubes’ world model will assume is available.