Introducing sound design

The sound system within the CryENGINE is a hierarchical class system that supports many different sound libraries and different target platforms. The sound system offers interfaces and is used by sound entities in a level, or can even be called from code to play sounds systematically. The principal focus was set to support the FMOD-EX library by FireLight Technologies (http://www.fmod.org/), but there is also support for the Xaudio port for Xbox360 and a dummy/null system.

A typical production workflow for integrating a new project contains the following steps:

1. Create a new project using the FMOD Design tool. Projects are stored as .fdp files.

2. Add groups, events, and sound definitions.

3. Organize sound assets into wavebanks.

4. Build the project that converts source .wav files to the target more compressed and optimized format for real-time playback formats such as .fev and .fsb. These formats are discussed later in the chapter.

5. Reference a sound event name in code or in the...