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

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

I think a lot of people, including me, will agree on this. :)

Kent Mein mentioned (on irc) a while ago he liked to look into this for  
a next release, fixing up the Soundsystem module to have it run without  
openAL (optional or default). This is very welcome work for a developer  
to do, we really need to cleanup the two mixed audio systems in  
Blender.

Targets or specs were not defined afaik, something we could discuss  
here. Bringing back support for fmod we cannot do (officially) since  
that violates GPL!

 From my humble ignorant perspective, a recode can just do this;

- kick out openAL completely and only use SDL; but first check if  
there's issues with supported audio formats
- remove all weird dependencies with audio we have in blender/src and  
blender/blenkernel. There's highly confusing code that mixes up loading  
sound (.wav) files with initializing the audio system. Initializing  
sound should not be related to loading files.
- make sure audio is only initialized and closed once, and can be  
omitted with "-noaudio" commandline option.
- code a simple SDL version for the "listener" to fade out sound on  
certain distances

-Ton-


On 23 Dec, 2004, at 12:30, Alexander Ewering wrote:

>
> 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
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>
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
--
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation ton at blender.org  
http://www.blender.org