Xact

[Anonymous]

I got this from my audiogang newsletter..

“XACT, the Xbox Audio Creation Tool, is the recommended tool and engine for audio development on the Xbox. Besides allowing a composer or sound designer access to the full complement of Xbox audio features (without needing to write code), it provides real-time in-game auditioning, mixing, and EQing capabilities, as well as solutions for dynamic music and non-repetitive, variable sound effects. This talk will cover the capabilities of the tool as well as providing an introduction to how content authoring and auditioning works in XACT.

This talk is geared primarily towards composers and sound designers who intend to work on Xbox titles, as well as those who are interested in augmenting their own audio engine feature sets.”

has anyone here heard more about it.. used it.. know anything about whether we can get hold of it..

I’m too far from San Fransisco to go to a lecture.. and have googled and found nothing….

:D

[Anonymous]

Quoting Brian Schmidt:

”
XACT is still mostly under NDA, but there is some public info on it…

We created XACT to make it easy for games to take advantage of the Xbox audio hardware. That meant (in our minds) putting control of the hardware into the sound designers/composer’s hands, rather than having to have the programmer to a lot of stuff.
On a programming level, the programmer basically just says “Play Sound A”, “Play Sound B”, and so on. (ok, there’s a *bit* more to it than just that). But the important thing is that what happens after the programmer says to “play sound A” is up to the sound designer. It could fire off a simple wavfile. Or it could start up a complex sound consisting of multipel tracks streaming from the hard drive, with various pitch,volume,filter envelopes with multiple variations. The programmer doesn’t really care. It also makes it really easy to stream multiple sounds from the hard drive.

The other thing XACT tries to do is to be a “Mixing” tool. While you’re playing your game build, you can connect the XACT Ui to your Xbox dev kit and tweak the sounds as the game’s playing.. This is really useful when you’re trying to adjust all the various elements: volume, pitch, etc. It’s also nice for replacing placeholder sounds with the real assets… and since you can listen in the context of the game without re-starting, it’s pretty quick.

One of the questions in the thread asked if there was anything for composers. With the most recent release, we’ve added a new interactive audio engine designed to help integrate more interactive music into the game… you don’t use XACT to create the music; rather you use it to specify how your pre-authored music stitches together in response to what’s going on in the game. For those of you who are xbox developers, check out the lasest relrease– THere’s also a very good paper on the new interactave audio feature of XACT at:

https://xds.xbox.com/BPProgInfo.asp?Page=content/cd_aud_wp_interactiveaudio.htm

<Sorry non-developers.. that site is only for Xbox developers>
”

Now to become a developer or for us audio folks a content provider the most usual option is to have the client company (who should already be licensed) obtain the development kit for you (thus gaining you access to the essential support resources).
More info here http://www.xbox.com/en-US/dev/contentproviders.htm

I haven’t used it myself but it is supposed to be an excellent audio tool for the platform.

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