Lately, I have been rewriting some of the subsystems in Icefall. Now that the core of the gameplay is in place, it is time to go back and implement flexible/efficient versions of systems I originally coded in very fast to get the basic game up and running. Mainly this involves recoding subsystems to do things like handle errors more gracefully, respect the user settings (and respond correctly when these are changed on the fly), and cover everything in detailed comments so that future generations can understand how it worked.

The audio engine is the latest of these. It has been redesigned and now supports multiple channels of audio, with their own volume/mute controls, and a master control that lets you mute everything in one fell swoop. The game also ploughs on if it tries to initialise the audio library and fails – now it just skips loading any audio resources, disables and greys out all the audio UI settings, and carries on. Much better than popping an “Audio engine failed to initialise. Icefall will now exit” error message 🙂

Here’s a screenshot of the new Audio page in the Options dialog (game music and sounds respond to any of these being changed, in real time):