New SoundBank and Joint Parenting

By Aaron Holowienka

This week I did a bunch of smaller tasks like bug fixing and adding minor changes. I started with implementing the new soundbank, which was a little more difficult than usual. The new sounds we got were the different ball types flying sounds. These sounds were tied to the throwing of the ball and the impact of the ball, so when a ball is thrown the sound will automatically transition into the looping flying sound and when it collides with something it will automatically stop. This was really cool and should’ve been easy to implement, but the way we had the soundbank setup previously, the throw sound were played on the person throwing the ball and impact sounds were played on the object the ball hit. The sound manager did not even know the balls existed. So, this required a little bit of refactoring the sound manager, but it turned out really cool. The only hang up we still have with it is that we reset balls after 5 seconds and sometimes they don’t play an impact sound before being reset, so until I get an actual stop loop event, I have to play the impact sound when resetting the ball. The other biggest thing I did this week was finally get a dummy ball parented to the players hand when he has a ball. We have been trying to do this for a week or two and could not figure out what was wrong because we just took the player’s wrist joint and multiplied it by the player’s world matrix but it was always offset really weirdly. I figured out that this was because we were using the joint after it had already been multiplied by the inverse bind pose and transposed, so I had to transpose it again and multiply the inverse of the inverse bind pose into it to correct it back to the base joint.