One of our early goals with Smash Hit was to combine audiovisual realism with highly abstract landscapes and environments. A lot of effort was put into making realistic shadows and visuals, and our sound designer spent long hours finding the perfect glass breaking sound. However, without proper acoustics to back up the different environments, the sense of presence simply would be there. To achieve full control over the audio processing and add environmental effects I needed to do all the mixing myself. Platform dependent solutions like OpenAL and OpenSL cannot be trusted here, because support for environmental effects is device/firmware specific and missing in most mobile implementations. Even it was available it would be virtually impossible to reliably map parameters between OpenSL and OpenAL. As in most cases with multi-platform game development, DIY is the way to go. Showcasing a few different acoustic environments Software mixer Writing a software mixer is quite reward
A game technology blog with focus on physics. I'm the co-creator of mobile games Smash Hit, PinOut, Does not Commute, Granny Smith, Beyondium and Sprinkle. Twitter handle: @tuxedolabs