Sound Manager

[historic_bruno]

When a sound is created, there is an option to load it's gain and pathname from a txt file. This doesn't seem like a very robust solution, as it may be desired to change the gains of multiple sounds at once, but in that case you'd have to find each txt file and edit them separately. Not to mention if you made a typo in the patthname...

One solution is to use tags in the sound file. If Ogg supports custom tags then it should be possible to add some kind of "gain" tag to it, which gets read when the sound is opened. There are tag editors out there which should allow mass editing of tag data.

Or we can specify the sound properties in one centralized location. Perhaps when the sound manager is initialized it can open an XML and read the properties from there into a data structure that is used for this purpose. Or maybe the sound manager itself shouldn't be responsible for that.

[Ykkrosh]

I think using custom features of file formats is generally bad (like using custom file formats), since it makes editing unintuitive and often requires special tools - better to keep things simple so you can use any old Ogg Vorbis exporter and a text editor.

I don't particularly like the current sound-group XML system, though - the XML files are verbose and unintuitive and contain lots of redundant data. Maybe it could be more like the texture XML format where you can specify the defaults for a whole directory then override them for groups of files, or something. I don't have any detailed ideas but it seems like an area where an improved technical design (and implementation) would be pretty useful to make it easier to maintain sounds.