hi
you can look through the languaga tutorials, of course
then you have programming practices, it might come in handy
and then you have references for each function in the reference section of the help topics
and last but not the least, there are some other example games that you can look upon by going to the bgt site.

Hi,
To make a sound, first
sound your_sound;
Your_sound is the custom name you can change it. Also, instead of spaces, you should use underlines. Buy typing
sound your_sound;
You have declared a sound object. So lets load it:
your_sound.load("directory");
If you want to use backslashes in the directory, you should put two backslashes. To play it, there are a few methods:
play();
This method will play the sound.
play_wait();
This method will play the sound, and additionelly will wait for the sound to stop playing.
play_looped:
This will loop the sound like a background music.
Also, you can stop a sound. To use one of the playing methods, you should type:
For example, I will use the play_wait method:
test_sound.play_wait();
To stop it,
your_sound.stop();
Let's go to the tts voice.
To declare it,
tts_voice your_voice;
You can change it's name too. I usually use v.
Ok. We have now declared it. Now let's get it to speak some text:
your_voice.speak_wait("Hello, I am your tts voice. Goodbye.");
For more information, please look at the manual.

Hi Mike,

As in all things there is a certain order or structure to programming. Generally, speaking you start by including any files needed by your project, then you declare variables and objects, add custom functions, and call main() to launch the program. Here is a very very simple example.

sound g_sound; // global sound object
voice_tts g_voice; // Global voice object

// Name: main ().
// Description: Entry point for the application.
void main ()
{

    // Load a wav file
    g_sound.Load ("Sounds/Sound.wav");

    // Play the sound
    g_sound.play ();
   
    // Speak the program name
    // and wait for it to finish
    // before exiting the script
    g_voice.speak_wait ("Sample application version 1.0");
}

If you examine this little script carefully you see I declared the sound and voice objects before creating the main function. Inside the main function I loaded and played a sound file using the sound object, and spoke a simple message with SAPI.

Notice here I specifically used a forward slash and not a backslash to load a file from a subdirectory. Get use to using forward slashes for directories as most programming languages won't allow you to use a backslash without an escape character, and Microsoft Windows is the only OS in existance that uses backslashes for directories anyway. Mac OS, Linux, FreeBSD, etc all use forward slashes when accessing files from subdirecgtories.  Windows supports this too, but Microsoft being Microsoft they adopted some off the wall standard back in the Dos days that is totally non-standard. Bottomline, ignore the advice above of using two backslashes and use a single forward slash instead. Its what most professionals do.

Thomas

If the actual script ends there, it's not going to work just because both a function and method invocation are opened without being closed.

If the rest is something to the effect of

"Hello world.");
}

Then it should work just fine.

You're welcome.

Glad to help. Just a note about your script. In addition to it not closing the function I also noticed a missing quote before the start of your message to speak. You need to remember to surround strings with quotes or the script compiler will think they are functions or variables and bomb out.

The manual says that both are valid.
Like he said, \\ is a windows thing, and / works just as well.

what kind of error you get, eg in which line, what.

i think you have to stop the sound, or wait for it to stop by
play_wait()
function though i'm not sure.

but, you know, even if you go through the language tutorial even once,
and if you go through programming practice part 1,
i think you will understand it more clear

for doing programming, you have to grasp all basic concepts and work them out yourself, or otherwise if you ask on every char of your code this way, it could take you another 10000000000 years to develop a game, really.

Sid, in BGT you can use either one. You can use a standard forward slash or two backslashes to make a break between directories and files.

The point I wanted to raise is that its more common in programming to use a single forward slash rather than two backslashes for a couple of reasons. One its less typing, and other operating systems such as Mac OS or Linux will not accept a double backslash in a program and give you a file or folder not found error. So its just better practice to adopt a forward slash instead of double backslashes.

Understand using two backslashes is not wrong, especially on Windows, but you have to type a backslash, the standard escape character for programming, followed by a second backslash for the directory break. My thinking here is why do that when you can simplify it by using a single forward slash?

You can use either one in BGT as its more a matter of personal preference rather than being right or wrong. However, as I've been programming for roughly 12 years now I've found using a forward slash rather than the Microsoft Windows double backslashes more universal and less typing. Its also what professionals tend to call code safe, because you are less likely to make a mistake. Here is an example of what I mean.

Let's say you have to access a file several directories down like
Data\\Sounds\\Player\\Jump.wav
which has a total of six backslashes in that string. If you should miss even one backslash you will get a runtime error when you run your game. If you had used a forward slash like
Data/Sounds/Player/Jump.wav
you not only used three slashes instead of six backslashes, but you have less chance of making a mistake. Which is why I personally recommend not using backslashes.

mike, in order to add more sounds and music to the game all you have to do is declare more sound objects and initialize them. For example, below I will declare and initialize five sounds.

sound g_sound1;
sound g_sound2;
sound g_sound 3;
sound g_sound 4;
sound g_sound5;

void main ()
{

    // Load the sounds
    g_sound1.load ("Boom.wav");
    g_sound2.load ("gun.wav");
    g_sound3.load ("player.wav");
    g_sound4.load ("enemy.wav");
    sound5.load ("music.wav");
}

Basically, the entire point of object oriented programming is to be able to create as many objects as you need, in this case sounds, by calling the class name and creating a specific instance, an object, that represents the thing you need. In the program above I named the objects g_sound1 through g_sound5 but I could have given them specific names like g_boom, g_gun, g_player, g_enemy, and g_music so it would be less confusing as to which sound I'm referencing in my program. In fact, get into the habit of giving your objects good names because as your programs grow an object called s is going to be very obscure and hard to read when you have a game that is 20,000 lines long and contains a couple hundred objects and variables in use at any given time.

Plus in case you are wondering why I add a g_ before the object names that is a holdover from C and C++ programming to help the developer identify global variables from local variables. Local variables, temp variables inside the body of your function, are only temporary and just called boom, music, gun, etc, but a lot of professionals, myself included, append a g_ to global variables to help immediately identify that this program or script is calling a global variable and not a local/temp variable. Its certainly a case of personal preference, not mandatory, but just one of those things I've found extremely helpful in working with huge programs with thousands of lines of code with hundreds of objects and variables etc.

Hi Thomas,

I know this was meant to be for beginners, but you'd agree with me when saying using an array there is more handy, right? At least I would...

And this brings me to another question, somewhat off topic but still.
This is also sort of directed towards Thomas, but any developer. When declaring sound objects, how do you name them?
What's your naming convention for variables?

For ScapeSkate, since it's folder structure is not too complicated and it doesn't have that many sounds, I split the sounds into categories, and had arrays of those different categories. So, a player-array for player sounds, Skateboard-array for skateboard sounds, environment, objects, jumps.

Just wanted to see how different coders do it. And this is where being one gets interesting. Everyone has their own style.

Since battle zone was my first serious project, and the project where I learned most of the concepts I use now, I began by using a whole bunch of sound objects and classes. THe classes contained sound objects of their own, which is fine. I had arrays of those classes because it's easy to loop through arrays. But then, when the sound pool came along, I was busy converting everything to use the soundpool, and I broke battle zone, as the 12.9 version shows. FOr some reason when I kill an enemy, the pit sound disappears too lol. Ah well I'll have to fix that later. Now with damage extreme I use sound pools mstly, and I have integers in my arrays representing the slot I used.