Sounds get mixed up

#21 I notice this problem gets worse with more number of sound fxs and music files in the game. For example, I have about 70 .ogg sound files, 7 large .ogg music files, and not one .wav file. in my Bugged Out Rally racing game. In this game, the mix up occurs for item pickup and weapon firing sounds.

I'm currently working on an action/adventure game which will have characters in the game along with space ships and wheeled vehicles that chars. can mount, but because this problem is more wide spread then just the foot steps, I'm not sure which .ogg file should be converted to .wavs. I would hate to convert all of them to resolve the problem, but then what's the sense of having ogg sound driver.

I doubt that clean 1.3 TGE will display this problem since the demo examples only have a handful of .ogg files in the game.

#22 Ben Garney,

Do .wav files take the same path to play sound as .ogg files? Maybe we can get clues there.

#23 @Akio
If it helps anything , on all my enviroment emitters and music i use ogg ,
I only use the wav files when i use a sound on shapebase object.

#24 Billy,

Hey, thanks. I'll make the changes that you've suggested.

#25 "
@Clint
Do you get this problem on a clean 1.3 ?
"

I'm still using something very close to clean 1.3, I only started work about a month or two ago. Of course it could be something I'm doing, I won't put it past me.

I don't recall it every happening until I started really working a lot with the engine, and even now I can't reliably reproduce it (haven't set down to figure it out) It just seems to happen sometimes when I start up the engine.

I am using one very large ogg file looping in the game, about 7 megs
I also AC'97 based sound

have you guys been able to reproduce this at garage games, or ever seen it in your work?

I really need to just sit down and debug it, make sure that the sounds are loading properly as far as tge is concerned.

I'm expecting to find a sound not load properly so when you ask to play it it just plays the wrong sound. but that may just be hopeful easy debugging thinking :)

ok, back to my hole...

#26 The AC 97 cards have problems with torque's sound apparently. I had to upgrade my driver just to play the RocketBowl demo, otherwise it would just straight-up crash. Although it did fix the crash, the mixed up sounds are still going on in the torque demo.

There is a new sound refactor resource here. Has anyone experiencing this problem tried it out yet? I've been meaning to give it a try, but I haven't yet.

#27 Drew, et al. Here at Large Animal we have found that, for some reason, the openAL32.dll 9.8.9 handles much better with older drivers (particularly the realtek AC 97 motherboard audio drivers pre 2003). We had been using 9.9.1 which was less forgiving. We think that just asking for too many sources (e.g. alGenSource() ) was causing at least one of the RocketBowl crashes when using 9.9.1 - switching to 9.8.9 openAL will complain but keep going when it can't return enough sources.

In terms of the "mixed up" cut off sounds -- this may be an issue with the number of available sources as well -- for instance, in RocketBowl, we need to let TGE have at least 13 sources (in openAL terms) to avoid sound cut off problems - maybe the demo just has situations where there are more sounds that want to play then sources available on your card (or requested by TGE, I think the default is that it requests 16)?

#28 For people having trouble with footstep sounds playing the wrong sound take a look at this post

if you just want to get it working search for on that page "vorbis tools" to see the post about what I did that fixed the problem for me.

but if you are interested please read the whole thread and maybe you can help find out what the real root problem is.

note that this hasn't fixed the problem with all the sound for me, but it definitely has with the majority of the sounds that had problems.

#29 Some problems here can be a missing path to or missing audio file .
I run into this when testing with the SDK 1.3 some footsteps sounds in the player.cs is wav files that no exist at all .
And that made the footstep sound switch to other sounds.

I think that someone need to clean up the starter.fps , i could do it but when SDK 1.4 comes out maybe everything has changed like the older versions.

In V12 all filenames was replaceme.wav i think this was easier then searching for missing audiofiles.
why make a description if the sound not exist.

#30 I don't think taht this is a problem of missing files, I have the same strong problem
running WinXp and SDK 1.3
This is a realy hard bug for releasing a game....

#31 It is infact a problem with missing paths to a file, as Billy said.
When you point it to a file that doesn't exist, it uses another audioprofile that has been loaded, instead.

You seem a bit stumbled Michael. It's a bug, the audio code is being worked on and there's not much we can do. You should try different audio channels for your sounds, and try to switch between the formats to see which work and which doesn't in each particular case.

Switching soundchannel for musid and sfx and giving them one each, solved alot of problems.

#32 The audio upgrade resource has stopped this problem completely for me (Win2K). Wav files do cause problems with the new audio on occasions though (horrible buzzing sound) but converted to OGG it all works fine.

www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=6863

#33 Sorry Stefan, what you mean with stumbled ??? We worked a long time on our game
until we noticed this bug. It is impossible to sell a game with this engine bug. The new
sound resource needs a great patch but if you do not use CVS, how to patch the engine??
A manually patch is to difficult a can result in great other problems.....

#34 @Michael
What problem do you have ?
A hint is not use streaming audio for short sounds effects.
And only use wave files on shapebase sounds like footsteps and more.
Use ogg or wave on emitter based sounds.
Use streaming audio on music.

#35 Thank you Billy, I changed all to wave and all the problems on our computers were
gone. So why to use these ogg?? Only to have smaller file size, no thank you.

#36 Mostly you use ogg for the size of the audio file.
If you gonna publish your game online its good idea to use ogg as much as possible because of the size.
Wave still beats the ogg or any other compressed sound format in quality , so
if you dont care about the size use wave.

#37 I've wondered about this problem since I got Torque. Same thing, Windows XP, onboard sound.

#38 I have this issue too on 1.3 (Crossbow firing sound getting mixed up), is no GG employee aware of this? It seems pretty fundamental to load the sounds correctly, I'm sure they should have found this bug themselves at some point.

#39 GG is aware of this and supposedly are working on fixing the audio system, for more discussions about this, look at my post above and follow the link...
where I say

Quote:For people having trouble with footstep sounds playing the wrong sound take a look at this post

I tracked some of the problems down a bit.

#40 I Too am having serious sound issues. In fact this is the only real bug we have so far in our project. I will try some of the things I see here and do some more research to see what I can get working.

It would be really nice if someone from GG would address this issue and let us know if they are working on a fix for 1.4.