In this recipe we will take a look into Panda3D's positional audio capabilities. 3D sound is a wonderful tool to immerse the player and to generate great atmosphere. Positional audio also can help the player to orientate: In a shooter, for example, it is much easier to return fire if one heard that the enemy units are attacking from behind.
Before starting this recipe, be sure to set up a project as described in Setting up the game structure. You will also need to provide a mono sound file called loop.wav in the sounds folder of your project.
Let's load a sound file and attach it to a model:
- Open
Application.pyand add the highlighted code:from direct.showbase.ShowBase import ShowBase from direct.showbase.Audio3DManager import Audio3DManager class Application(ShowBase): def __init__(self): ShowBase.__init__(self) self.smiley = loader.loadModel("smiley") self.smiley.reparentTo(render) self.audio = Audio3DManager(self.sfxManagerList[0]) self.audio.attachListener(self.cam) self.loop = self.audio.loadSfx("loop.wav") self.loop.setLoop(True) self.audio.attachSoundToObject(self.loop, self.smiley) self.loop.play() self.cam.setPos(0, -40, 0) - Hold the left mouse button and move the mouse to pan the camera, or hold down the right mouse button and use the mouse to zoom in and out of the scene. Note how the sound position changes.
The key to positional audio in Panda3D is the Audio3DManager class. After adding a smiley to the scene, we initialize the Audio3DManager and set the camera to be the listener object. This has the effect that all sounds played using positional audio will be mixed relative to the NodePath we pass to attachListener().
Then, the sound file is loaded, set to be a loop and attached to the smiley, so that the sound plays wherever the object is positioned in the scene. Finally we start to play the sound loop and position the camera.