[Uni-verse] Long post about everyting sound and more.

[Eskil Steenberg]

Hi

Regarding the sound system, As you may know i have been traveling a bit 
and have had the time ti think this thing over.

I sent out a API  to the mailing list and the latest version of verse 
also has this API (although not fully implemented under the hood), still 
I havent got any response on an issue i conceived as "hot". there are 
how ever some thing i im beginning to doubt, First of all the time 
stamps, since most of verse doesnt have time stamps having sound time 
stamps will not sync the sound with the graphics. Next, to use time 
stamps requires you to have more buffering of the sound introducing 
latency. And then again each sound command has its own length and each 
channel has its own frequency. shuldent the different commands be merged 
by frequency not time stamp?

Then again comes the storage of sound:

I think we need storage of sound, but not for the same reasons as 
discussed before. I think we need sound "assets" to be able to have two 
sound editing apps like  CoolEdit and WaveLab work together on the same 
sound clip just like Maya and Max on a mesh. Again tis is a move to 
accommodate the content creation aspect of verse rather then the VR 
aspect. For live sound we keep the streaming sound. We would not add any 
functionality to trigger the asset sounds. if on wants to play a asset 
sound one subscribes to it and then pipes it back to verse threw the 
streaming channels. Why? because clients can not be expected to down 
load large sets of clips they have o idea if they ever will be 
triggered. My guess is that i would get a lot of flack over that but i 
think its the right thing to do. It also avoids over complicating sound 
players who would have to be able to play both clips and streams.
 
None of this makes client development any simpler at all, quite the 
opposite, but it enables verse to be used for more things.

Cheers

E