Audio

Game audio:

• Sound effects: short, triggered (gunshot, footstep).
• Music: long, looping (BGM, level theme).
• Voice: dialogue, narration.
• Ambient: background loops (rain, crowd).

Audio loop:

• Hardware: callback into your code at sample rate (44.1 kHz).
• Buffer: ~10-20ms of samples per callback.
• You fill buffer with mixed audio.

Real audio:

• Multiple channels (stereo, 5.1).
• Volume per source.
• Pitch shifting (resample).
• Effects (reverb, echo).
• 3D positional audio: distance attenuation, panning.

3D audio:

• Each sound has source position.
• Listener has position + orientation.
• Distance: louder near, quieter far. Falloff curve (linear, inverse, exponential).
• Panning: stereo balance based on direction.

Doppler effect:

• Moving sources shift pitch.
• Approach: higher. Recede: lower.
• Optional; adds realism.

Audio middleware:

• FMOD: industry-standard. Free for indie.
• Wwise: AAA standard, more features.
• OpenAL: cross-platform 3D audio API.
• SDL_mixer: simpler, free.
• miniaudio: lightweight C library.

Streaming vs preloaded:

• SFX: load whole file (small).
• Music: stream from disk (otherwise eats RAM).

Compression: Ogg Vorbis, Opus for streaming. WAV for SFX (no decode latency).

Latency:

• SFX-to-speaker: 50-150 ms typical.
• Lower = better feel for action games.
• Smaller buffer = lower latency but harder real-time.

For our toy: skip audio implementation; focus on game loop + ECS. Real engine integrates SDL_mixer or similar.