stwf

hmm, is there an easy way you can recreate this? Any other info you can give me? What platform, map, etc.....

Oops, sorry, it's hard to tell n the Mac with all of the boost warnings. Does the stereo music seem to be working now?

THe Sound manager could support it at any time, if anyone wants to let me know about where to find the code that might call this, I'd be willing to give a look, but I'm unfaliliar with that part of the program. There is a roll-off as you zoom up, just less so for things like acknowledgements. Let me know how the latest trunk version sounds. I always figured there would be a lot of tweaking of these gain values...

As far as I know MP4 decoding isn't really free or open source, so I doubt we can use it. The sound manager currently only supports ogg encoded sounds.

To me it seems like I'd only really want to hear the battle music when I was starting a large attack I had prepared and moved into place. While I want to be notified of any violence happening to my units, I do't consider it a battle when an enemy band happens upon an army gathering spot. So maybe it could be based on the user input, like change to battle music when 10 or more units are commanded by the user to attack inside enemy territory (or your opponent launched such an attack inside your territory). Since its just a bonus nicety anyway I hate to see a lot of time being spent agonizing over when certain songs should be played. Technically you are in a battle as soon as you appear on the map!

OK, I just checked in some changes. I rolled back some of the volume rolloff stuff, so you can always hear everything (on screen at least). Off screen will roll off quicker, but not as sharply. Fixed bugs are that sounds marked as distanceless will again always play loud, regardless of height. I also threw in some hints that I found to aid in stereo sound being played. On my Mac with Mountain Lion I can confirm its playing in stereo, but that doesn't mean thats happening on all platforms. I hope the new code is the right incantation to get stereo sound playing on the platforms where it isn't playing yet. If not let me know. Unless there we can get everyone to agree on the rolloff thing it may be better to let it rest. A good solution might be separate volume controls in the settings. So people who want to hear can what they want. For my coding I'm going to look at the real gameplay bugs, like hearing sounds you shouldn't be hearing and we can some back to this later. How does that sound?

Electricity came back last Wednesdy, but still no phone or Internet at home. Hopefully that will be cleared up tomorrow or so. At full height you wouldn't want much to be heard, but this would let you specify some sounds to fade out sooner than that. So technically it isn't a height thing, but an importance thing. Things like chopping and minig would fade out half way up, while battle sounds wouldn't fade until closer to the top. I think adding sound support to Atlas is a good idea. After the gameplay issues get cleared up I would like to look into fixing the Atlas issues.. I'll have time this weekend to make certain this works and should be able to get it checked in before Sunday.

Still no electricity at home, but we've been promised to get it by Wednesday night. I've never been so happy to be at work! I also think its important to keep the gain parameter solely as a means to balance out the relative volumes of the sounds. I'll plan on getting a start on this right after the alpha 12 release. So I can think about how to do it. Maybe a float paramater defaulting to 1.0, which would strictly apply to the camera height. 1.0 would indicate silent at full height (whatever that might be), 0.5 means it fades out around half height, and you would put a 3 or 4 for things like acknowledgments and deaths that you always want to hear, but should observe some fall off. As always opinions welcomed...

Hello All, I'm currently in down time at home due to the hurricane but I was working on the sound issues when the power went out! I did find/fix one issue with the acknowledgements not being heard when zoomed out. But got caught in a bind with the battle noises. Some battle noises can be heard because they are being set at a much louder gain. Typical battle sounds are set to play between 0.6 and 0.4 gain. But some others like the death noises and a couple of arrow sounds are set to play between 1.0 and 0.8. Since the distance rolloff acts on the gain you would need twice as far a distance to have these sounds fade out. For now I will change the distance curve to make all sounds inaudible at full zoom out. But this will probably make other sounds fade out too fast. We may need a new parameter inside the audio xml files to indicate what distance they should be heard from so we can control this more directly.

Hello, Sorry about that bug, its checked in now. I think that may have just been introduced. Personally I have a hard time telling the difference. ANyway I'm back looking at this now. Just finishing up a big project at work...

ok, gotcha So as intended, things like chopping and mining are inaudible when zoomed out. Unintended bug, distanceless sounds like responses also fade out with distance, I will fix that. So you do expect battle sounds to fade out with distance and they currently don't, right?

so sorry about the whitespace, I meant to delete that... I'll be more careful in the future.

OK, I'll put these in the rough order I'll take them on.... I'll try get the sounds adhering to this chart, except perhaps the ambient issues. It seems like thats just a nice finishing touch but not really a priority at this point. Also maybe here it would be good to take the music control out of the scripts hands. The scripts can still start music but I'll take out the part where they do now. Let the SoundManager play each of the Peace songs with a gap in between. Also pause it and the ambient when the game pauses. This seems like it should be done. I agree this feature is necessary, also to have it display on the minimap. Like RoN, but I'm not sure this is a sound manager issue. It should either be up to the scripts to send this message, or part of the larger battle detection issue. It would be good to have the UI sounds, do we have any? I can always make some bad ones and put them in there as placeholders I guess. I have seen some discussion on switching the UI engine. In that case perhaps this work could wait. yup, A nice idea also like RoN have buildings make a noise. I think it only does it once though, each time they come into view. I'll double check on that... OK, thanks again for the ideas... feel free to comment or add on

OK, finally the volume roll off with distance seems to be working well. Also the threaded maintenance of looping sounds! Now checked into svn. Let me know how it works... Thanks for all of the feedback I'll comment on them in the next post

imho, the AI's biggest weakness is that once they start attacking a building they will not stop. So it makes it easy for a group of 4 or 5 soldiers to take out any number of attackers, since they continue to attck the building, even when being shot by someone else. I would recommend that any unit automatically return fire. It is wrong how easy it is to defend against them!!

Hello All, Just to let you all know the sound development hasn't stopped, of course... I have a new branch up on git at: https://github.com/stwf/0ad/tree/threaded-sound This has moved the work of keeping music going into a separate thread. If anyone wants to give it a try, please do. Only tested on a mac, but it let me lower the buffer sizes a lot and didn't miss a beat (ha). I'll test in on some different platforms before I think about making a patch. There also may be a fix for the reports of bad sounding music, and the hissing issue. So any one who still has one of those problems could also help out by trying out the code. In absence of bug reports I'll be tackling the sound roll off as we zoom in and out, and as far as I know thats it as far as specced behavior. So otherwise let me know what issues you'd like to be tackled next... Some sort of a system for battle sounds? Different handling of the music choices (other than endless repeating). Intensity based triggers for using alternate sounds (like groups of 10 woodcutters). Let me know! steve

Hello, so you are saying that the latest svn fixes the problem even on your one bad machine? If this is true it is excellent news. The fix was only for the hissing issue, but it would be great if it also affected the reports of mismatched volume also...

Can you build the package from source? There may be a fix in the svn trunk that clears this up...

Although I still haven't seen (heard) this problem, I did some googling around and checked in what may be a quick fix. If someone with this problem could build the latest from svn and let me know if that helps it would be great...

OK, new code checked in should at least limit the strings of errors to one, when the object is created instead of every time it is tried to be played. Also a fix to the reference counting may free up some extra buffers.

I hav been, and will continue to look at he old code to see if they we modifying the sound at all. But I can't find it. I will also look into the positioning, etc. perhaps that affects the sound. Personally I worry more about the stability, etc. Especially since the old sound system had so many issues. We can fix the audio quality later, after some more objective observations. To figure out what is going on... But I will keep at it

Hello All, OK, I added some more error handling to the ogg file inits, and hopefully it will both report and handle errors better... Sorry about the mFilename thing. Originally The sounds were reference counted and created, freed, and reinitialized dynamically. But it became apparent that the javascript engine isn't always good about reporting when things are deleted or go out of scope, also most sounds are rused again and again, so they should really be cached anyway. I will go through and make sure all remnants of that system are cleaned up.

OK, I think it was a bug. Just the Mac didn't seem to mind.

Platform info? I don't see this on the mac...

Hi, I was trying to commit this, but by the time I was done testing it look like someone else did it... Right?