[Bf-committers] Experiences with the engine and sound on linux

[Alexander Ewering]

Hello,

I've recently tried to get sound working in the game engine on linux
(from a user perspective), and it was a total failure.

The only occasion when I could get sound to be heard AT ALL was when
I set it to one of the Looping modes, non-looped sounds just don't
work. This is the same behaviour as in 2.25, btw (it got introduced
in 2.25, too).

I thought I had seen a commit that fixed this, but appearently I've
been wrong.

Even then, the looped sound (which is unusable because it's an
event sound) came with about half a second latency. I guess that
can be fixed with a smaller mixing buffer size, though.

On the whole, I would like to say the following about OpenAL:

In my opinion, it's a library of questionable quality. 
It has terrible docs (try
to google for any of the functions, you won't find a lot of useful
hits), there is no command reference anywhere (anywhere = what I
could find in 5 minutes (5 minutes is a lot for me)), the packages
that come with various distributions are unstable or strangely
linked.

On the whole, wouldn't it be an option to move to SDL and SDL_mixer?

I'm not sure if we can get all the funky spacial doppler effects
then, but at least we can get it *basically* working :) For me,
directional panning and attenuation with an adjustable rolloff
factor would be far enough. And that's even possible without SDL_mixer
by simple reusage of, for example, the sequencer audio code...

Of course, I wouldn't know how to deal with all this if it should
work in exported runtimes, etc., nor in the plugin...

Well, maybe some people can give opinions or flame me :)

Oh, and is it possible to switch to the old (pre-2.25) audio system? 
(I think it was FMOD)

| alexander ewering              instinctive mediaworks
| ae[@]instinctive[.]de   http://www[.]instinctive[.]de