olofson / audiality2

A realtime scripted modular audio engine for video games and musical applications.
http://audiality.org/
zlib License
80 stars 5 forks source link

Change API prefix from A2 to AY #360

Open olofson opened 1 year ago

olofson commented 1 year ago

While "A2" might look cool, it's not very clever to build the major version number into every bit of the API. We have a versioning API!

(Besides, it's awkward to type on some keyboard layouts, like my current Dvorak variant, where the numbers are on shift, since I use the numpad to type anything beyond single digits.)

My suggestion is AY - the first and last letters of the name.

Fun fact

The widely used General Instruments PSG chip, AY-3-8910, reminds a bit of the origins of Audiality 2: "speaker" - a sound effect generator and PC speaker emulator, originally created for porting a DOS game project to SDL, later subverted into a polyphonic chip sound effect engine.

That little fun hack eventually turned into an experiment: Is it possible to fit a "usable" audio engine in 2000 lines of C code?

The conclusion was "yes," and some of the concepts discovered through that experiment (tree processing graph, timestamped events, sub-sample timing, "everything is a voice", inline audio context scripting, recursively spawnable subvoices, script "programs" and "event handlers" as glue between API and sound design etc) live on in the Audiality 2 design.