These are my own suggestions for sound support in SSVGA. I have discussed some of them briefly with Brian, but they are by no means official. Brian, please comment!
There are three major sources of sound in SCI1:
* MIDI music
* Digital samples
* CD audio
The first one requires special editor software (since SCI does not use the standard MIDI format), which would be very time-consuming to write. So my suggestion is to leave it out, at least at first.
The digital sample format is not a standard one either, but it uses standard PCM (with optional compression) encoding, so the effort required to create an import/export function would be minimal.
There is plenty of good sound editing software available, so a fully-fledged built-in one is not necessary.
As for background music, I'd recommend the third option. CD-recorders are now prevalent, and burning audio format tracks onto a CD is easy.
So my suggestion is to make the music in MP3 format (or other sound formats), and tell users to download and burn the sound files in audio format to a CD.
Apart from ease of coding and use, this has the benefit of being able to listen to the music from one's favorite game in a standard CD player.
I'd be willing to help with some of this (a few extensions to the class library
would be necessary for CD audio to replace MIDI completely).
