This week we didn’t get as much accomplished as we had hoped. Roidz had a family emergency that has required his attention and obviously family takes precedence over time spent programming. Meanwhile, I’ve been traveling so I haven’t been at my PC to program as much as I’d like. But such is life.

In my previous weekly recap, I mentioned that we were working on a big update to cInput and also two other projects. The good news is that one of the two projects is nearly finished, so I think it’s time to reveal some more details about it.

cAudio is our new Unity asset that will allow you to easily categorize music and other sounds and audio in such a way that the volume for each will automatically be set and will update automatically when that category’s volume setting is changed. For example, one thing a lot of games do is provide separate volume settings for music and sound effects. This way people who prefer to have the music off can turn it down but still be able to hear the other sounds in the game, which are often used as notifications for important events in games. cAudio provides a simple way to play sounds and have them organized according to these categories, or labels. It’s actually a lot easier to show than to tell, so here’s a (modified) preview screenshot to make things clearer:

cAudio Preview

That’s not all that cAudio does, but that will likely be what it is most used for. This week Roidz and I have been putting the final touches on cAudio, and it is essentially finished (the programming, anyway). However, I’m learning again–as I did with cInput a year ago–that the work isn’t finished when the programming is done. I’ve been working on typing up the documentation and creating a demonstration project that people can play with so they can clearly see what cAudio does.

Roidz has also done some fine work on the other project, which I suspect I’ll reveal more details about next week. We were hoping to have it at about the same stage that cAudio is at right now, but as I said, things came up. Our goal for launch is for the first week of April. There’s basically only one week left of March, so we’d better get cracking this next week and get things finished!

That pretty much sums up this week’s progress.