Weird OpenAL mini delays
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/Weird OpenAL mini delays
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| I've got a TButton type in my framework which makes a mouse over noise when you hover over it. With the OpenAL sound driver I've occasionally noticed a 1/2 second (or so) hang when hovering over a button near the start of my game. I say hang as the mouse (and pointer particles) stop moving. With FreeAudio there seems to be no such hang. It's weird. I have a SB Audigy 2. Anyone else found this? |
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| Most current drivers? "real soundcards" by Creative tend to have been a little problematic with OpenAL. You might as well need to download their dynamic libraries for maximum performance if you do not have them yet. |
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| good point I haven't tried the most recent drivers. I just wondered if it was an OpenAL problem as FreeAudio doesn't have it. I am already useing the OpenAL .dlls if that's what you meant. |
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| There is more than one OpenAL DLL, thats why I pointed out if you are using those from the creative page |
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| The Creative ones are pretty much the official ones. Seeing as Creative are one of the main driving forces behind OpenAL. @Grey: Are you using the hardware or software driver for OpenAL? |
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| hmm I thought I'd got mine from the creative site... Using OpenAL Generic Software as apparently the hardware one had some channel limit problems on some systems. |
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| Software sadly won't overcome the channel limit problem. It will just enforce a switch forward and backward between channels and make it slower ... perhaps thats causing the mini delays. A sound card only support 16 channels won't support more channels just because it runs on software mode. Its still the same 16 channels ... Especially with old systems, the problem might tendentially become larger not smaller. Don't know if there are especially problematic chips, I haven't had anything else than RealTek AC97 and now RealTek HD onboard chipsets for the past 7 years and they never had problems. would be better if the game scaled accordingly and did a "sound priority" handling when it comes to which sound is needed to be played and which not or which channel needs to be stopped (pausechannel won't give the channel free) when in favor for which other channel. Should be quite easy using a priority queue basing on a heap ... |
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| No, that's not how it works. If you're using the OpenAL Software Device, ALL the mixing is done in software and then the result is sent the the sound card. It does not rely on any hardware channels for the software channels. The OpenAL Software Device has a limit of 256 'sources' (similarly FMOD's software mixer limit is 1024). Muttley |
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