Why sound volume low?

#1 Please specify what you are doing to produce this error, as this is totally pointless if you don't give any details.

It could be anything.

#2 Its not pointless, Im just asking if anyone has had any problems with this. its nothing fancy just playing a song in torque. how specific can it be? the file plays loud in the default media player, but its very quiet in torque. Anyone have any ideas why?

#3

Quote:
how specific can it be?

More specific than you seem to know.

Hey look, these kind of things HAPPEN. But it could be ANYTHING that you have done wrong, or simply that your OpenAL driver is outdated, to pull something out from the air.

Give us a bit of the script to look at, maybe the profile, eventual errors and such. Does RealmWars work for you? The standard demo? Any other games that fail with volume? Etc!

#4 Actually we have run this problem while developing Dark Horizons Lore. It's essentially a known problem with the OpenAL drivers so it can affect any/all Torque based games on a wide range of Operating Systems (ie. Windows and MacOSX).

Here is how you can get around the problem is you are using a Windows based system:
1) Click on your "Start" button
2) Choose "Settings"
3) Choose "Control Panel"
4) Once the Control Panel for your Windows OS has opened choose "Sounds and Multimedia".
5) This will bring up the "Sounds and Multimedia Properties" window. Click on the "Audio" tab,
6) click on the 'Advanced" button under the 'Sound Playback" group.
7) This will bring up an "Advanced Audio Properties" windowChoose the "Performance" tab.
8) Here you will see a slider entitled "Hardware Acceleration", slide this setting all the way to the left (None).

If you are using Mac, unfortunately there is no fix that I know of. Perhaps someone else can chirp up with info.

Note: We are still looking into the report that the latest OpenAL drivers have an even worse affect on the audio of some of the older Torque games.

Logan

#5 Logan: will this hurt any other performance?

#6 I have done nothing wrong unnless the tutorial is wrong. http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=2729 Sound is low in realm wars too. No other games have problems. In the profile

ew AudioDescription(MusicLooping)
{
volume = 1.0;
isLooping = true;
is3D = false;
type = $MusicAudioType;
};

Does increasing the volume help? I tried it but it sounded the same

#7 I have the same problem. Sound in torque is very quiet. All sounds, starting with the button over sound in the main menu. I'm using an old version of the engine and an old version of the openAL32.dll. If I switch to the latest openAL32.dll it says something like 'missing function eaxset' 'missing function eaxget' in the console and there is no sound.

Windows 2000, turtle beach santa cruz sound card

#8 I tried the steps above for adjusting the hardware acceleration but no luck. Just for info i'm running xp with creative sb live series

#9 Its OpenAL. Sadly it isn't very well supported by hardware vendors outside of Creative Labs.

#10 So are there any sound cards that work well.

#11 L Foster: I remember that since the old Alien VS Predator games, they also had compitability issues. I seem to recall that had to do with the audio channels being set independntly.

#12 Virtual Campus - probably some of the cards by Creative Labs work well.

#13 Yikes, sounds like this thing is going to put major dents into GG games :(

#14 I dunno. OpenAL works great on my crystal audio card, which is pretty no-name. I'm sure there are cards where OpenAL doesn't work, but there are also plenty where it does work.

Not an issue.

#15 Oh it works, it just doesnt work well. Pretty much in line with everything in the torque engine so I guess it isn't an issue

#16 Ooh, burn. ;)

We're shipping several games that rely on OpenAL, and they work pretty consistently. UT2K4 uses OpenAL, too.

Now, the in-engine audio code may not be the best (it's on our todo list), but OpenAL itself is not intrinsically crappy.

#17 As for my own problem, the only sounds I ever hear is the explosion. I didn't know it was supposed to play more sounds untill i saw the ogg files. I am curious as to why I have more than one computer here, yet the only sounds in the game I realy can hear is the explosion?

#18 This fixed it for me:
in prefs.cs:
change
$pref::Audio::channelVolume1 = .8;
$pref::Audio::channelVolume2 = .8;
$pref::Audio::channelVolume3 = .8;
$pref::Audio::channelVolume4 = .8;
$pref::Audio::channelVolume5 = .8;
$pref::Audio::channelVolume6 = .8;
$pref::Audio::channelVolume7 = .8;
$pref::Audio::channelVolume8 = .8;
...
$pref::Audio::masterVolume = .8;

TO

$pref::Audio::channelVolume1 = 1.0;
etc..
..
$pref::Audio::masterVolume = 1.0;

edit note: This made the .wav file play as loud as it did in the WAV editor

#19 Is rasing a post from one year back bad as much as it is in other forums?

#20 Yes and no, as this problem still apparently exists for folks for various reasons, and at least the bump actually posts a potential solution for some of those reasons ;)