PocketMatrix

Hi Ian,
if you want to use Hekkus in your game I suggest you to use always the latest version. 0.99.rc3 is the latest release candidate and I'm planning to release it as a stable build on the next week.

Hekkus support 8, 16bit in mono/stereo wavs and even compressed ADPCM wavs so for sound effects you shouldn't have problems. The only module format supported by Hekkus are ProTracker mods (.mod) but with the ability to play non standard PT mods up to 32 channels you can write all type of music and the very fast engine on Hekkus will play it with very low performance hit on your game.

Compared to the old 0.98.x version 0.99.x are more optimized and I'm always getting feedback from the users to fix bugs or problems so the use of the latest version is always the best choice.

License is written from a developer to other developers that work on this crazy ppc market. Use Hekkus on your game without restrictions and if you earn something provide a donation.

I've used Hekkus in two projects now, Invasion: Trivia and K&G Arcade. I:T was PF-based (pre-PHAL) and K&G is GD-based (3.0).

From a technical standpoint, getting Hekkus into your project is a trivial exercise. You'll probably spend more time getting your project environment set up to use it than actually writing code!

I choose to NOT use the modified game class for either PF or GD, I integrated Hekkus myself. I like this approach better because it allows me to upgrade one library or the other independantly or the other, without having to wait for anyone to provide the updated class.

It pretty much amounts to a single call to initialize Hekkus at app startup, then it's just loading WAVs, MODs and whatever else (as little as a single line, looking very much like loading a surface in either library). You'll also want to hook the minimize/maximize event handlers to suspend and resume Hekkus (again, a single line of code each). Pretty much three lines of code is all you need to get Hekkus up and running, after your environment is set up for it of course.

Playing a sound, be it a WAV file or MOD file, again is, you guessed it, a single line of code! Most of the time I suspect you won't have to worry about channels and such, just tell Hekkus to play your sound and be done with it. The exception is looping sounds that you know you'll need to stop later. In that case you'll need to record the channel it gets played on so you can stop it later (assuming your not going to just do a stop all), but we're talking trivial things here.

I can tell you that Hekkus is fantastic performance-wise. I've done tests to see how much of an impact it actually has and the result every single time has been that it's not worth even thinking about. This is with a number of WAVs playing over a background MOD by the way, so load isn't an issue, at least not that I've seen (50 WAVs at once might be a problem!)

Memory-wise, the latest versions are better than the older ones (I think Thomas did some work to cut down how much memory a WAV uses, not a huge difference but still). There is also ADPCM compression built-in, which made life so much better coding K&G Arcade!

In my mind, I looked at MikMod early on and found it a bit more difficult than I would have liked (simplicity is a big plus of Hekkus... it's easy to get working initially and easy to understand). FMod I had much the same reaction to as MikMod.

In short, the price can't be beat and Thomas has done a tremendous job putting this thing together. If you need all the effects and such that FMod supports, then there's not much comparison. But if your looking to play some WAVs and/or MODs and want something efficient, inexpensive and easy to use, Hekkus I truly believe is unmatched. I think you knew all that though...

Technical gotchas to be on the lookout for? None that I have encountered. It has really been smooth sailing with Hekkus. Oh yeah... Previous versions did get flagged by one or two code checkers that I use (DevPartner, Entrek, etc.) for some things, but the latest versions get through free of any flags. They may have been false positives previously, but it looks very clean now, so by all means grab the latest version!

I actually think the style of the artist I worked with fit perfectly with what the game is. He's probably not the best on the planet, but I don't think I could imagine the game looking any different than it does. He's also the one that brought Krelmac & Gentoo to life after I came up with them, and I really like the way they are drawn. That artistic style extends to everything in the game, and I think it works well.

Not to get into an off-topic rant, but...

If people's opinion of the graphics is what is keeping sales down, then I'm not sure I even WANT to be in such a market.

If people just don't think the game is fun, well, I can live with that because after all that's what a video game should be all about to someone. As long as they TRIED it to reach that conclusion, then fine, no problem.

But if you look at a screenshot on a website and say "Oh, those graphics suck, I'm not even going to bother checking this game out"... well, honestly, your not even a customer I'm sure I WANT because there's a good chance your never going to like anything I do because I believe gameplay is what's important, not what a game looks like. Whether I succeded in making a fund game or not is up to each person that tries it of course.

I don't mean to imply that graphics are completely unimportant, I mean, Halo wouldn't be terribly fun if done with stick figures! But if that's the primary reason anyone buys a game, then my opinion is that your priorities are out of wack to begin with.

I'm very old-school, as evidenced by the fact that I play C64 and ColecoVision games FAR more than I play anything else, except maybe Halo, which just plain gets it right every which way you can name. If a game is fun, it's just fund, what it looks like doesn't much matter.

The people that have actually played K&G Arcade seem to generally like it. I've pretty much universally gotten good comments posted, so my feeling is that people probably ARE taking the time to try the game out and decide if it's fun or not, so ultimately I don't think getting a truly top-draw artist would have mattered.