Every new sound effect added to Galactic Gladiators makes the battle feel more alive.
The small fighters now have their own weapon sound. The medium ships fire with considerably more authority. Missiles hit the player with a proper impact, ships arrive with mechanical pulses, explosions have weight, and the appearance of an etheric hole is accompanied by an appropriately strange celestial sound.
But adding more sounds created an unexpected problem: they began interrupting one another.
Some effects were using Windows’ PlaySound function. It works well for simple WAV playback, but it effectively provides one shared channel. If another sound starts, the previous one may be cut short. In a busy battle containing gunfire, impacts, alarms, speech, music and explosions, that quickly becomes noticeable.
The solution was to give the important sounds their own preloaded audio players. Music, BARF’s speech, portal effects, enemy weapons, impacts, explosions and arrival sounds can now overlap without molesting one another.
That change makes an enormous difference. The soundscape is no longer a queue of effects politely waiting—or fighting—to be heard. It now resembles an actual battle.
The final medium-ship defence has also gained more personality. When only one defender remains, its behaviour becomes increasingly desperate as it takes damage. Its movements widen, its direction changes become sharper, its dives grow deeper and its recovery time becomes shorter.
By its final hit point, it no longer looks like a ship calmly following a programmed route. It looks like something that knows it is losing.
BARF naturally observes:
“Its tactical doctrine appears to have changed to panic.”
When the two medium ships first arrive, BARF waits for the spectacle to finish before adding:
“Well. That seems excessive. I’m putting the kettle on.”
Galactic Gladiators is still being built in Visual FoxPro 9, but moments like this are where it begins to stop feeling like a programming experiment and starts feeling like a game.