Missing footstep (and other?) sounds

[Noisycricket]

I tried troubleshooting this a little today and found someone had put forth a theory about the same channel not being able to load another sound until it was finished playing the current sound. When i set maxsoundspershader (in both instances in the doomconfig.cfg to be safe) to 1, only 1 of the four footstep sounds will play for a given speed of movement. It plays over and over, and i don't get any missing steps either, or at least that seems to be the case. There is a small amount of variation in frequency, but im guessing thats because the step trigger is tied to the bob settings? Can someone point me in another direction to look at? Or is this a dead end with no solution except to shorten the sound file?

[Springheel]

Each footstep shader has at least 4 different sounds that are selected from randomly. When you change "maxsoundspershader" to 1, you're just telling the code to always pick the first sound in the list.

[Noisycricket]

Right, i noticed that, i thought it might at least be a clue as to what it was not. Yet certainly more then one sound at a time usually comes through your speakers right? You can have an ambient track playing in all channels, then swing a sword and the ambient track doesn't stop, then start again. Normally you'll have a good 20 or so sounds coming through you speakers at heavy load.. I remember the "Fall of Berlin" map on Battlefield 2142, there was a sort of choke point there that one side always had to get through. There would be 30 guys on each side next to each other, all fighting or moving and I remember thinking, what a cluster F of sound. I also remember the Xf-I card could support up to 128 voices, which i thought to mean, 128 sounds at a time. I wonder if its a limitation of .oggs?

[Springheel]

Not sure if there's a limit of how many oggs can be playing at once. My uneducated guess would be that sounds are trying to play on the same channel, and are cutting off other sounds on that channel. I know that a new sound playing on the "voice" channel (or whatever it's called) will cut off a bark that has already started.

[Fidcal]

Must be worth substituting some ultra short sounds (any) to see if the length of the sound is the problem to test your theory NC.

[DeTeEff]

I know that a new sound playing on the "voice" channel (or whatever it's called) will cut off a bark that has already started.

 

Ironiously this is one thing I like about Thief; The AI's speech is stopped instantly if the AI sees you or notice anything strange. In some games the talking can go on as the sound file will play to the end no matter what

[Springheel]

It's certainly desirable, otherwise the AI could be saying two things simultaneously. But it could result in something getting cut off if it's on an unexpected channel. For instance, are footsteps played on the Body channel?

[grayman]

For instance, are footsteps played on the Body channel?

 

Yes, footsteps are played on the body channel.

 

 

 

[Noisycricket]

Must be worth substituting some ultra short sounds (any) to see if the length of the sound is the problem to test your theory NC.

 

I can pretty much confirm that already since i decided to finish something i started, which was the quiet (er) footstep set i was working on. I inserted some sounds which took into account the entire planting of the foot from heel to toe, which is longer (x3 on some of the crouch_walk's) than the current sounds. The crouch and the run clip quite a bit more. Hopefully its not some global parameter that is causing this which can't be switched off for the guard vocals.

[Springheel]

Yes, footsteps are played on the body channel.

 

So are the zone ambient tracks. Yet I've never noticed footsteps cutting off the ambient, or vice versa. Maybe the voice track is a special case?

[Serpentine]

So are the zone ambient tracks. Yet I've never noticed footsteps cutting off the ambient, or vice versa. Maybe the voice track is a special case?

 

That's something quite interesting... I'm not sure if it's the same channel in regards to AI and such but :

 

I seem to remember running into an issue where when ambient is used by location info, that quicksave/load sometimes breaks either footsteps(usually only of certain npcs) or the ambient. I'm sure I can dig around and find some other reports and make a bugreport if I can reproduce it.

[LEGION]

This issue with ambients disappearing after quicksave (never after quickload I got that) I got very, very often during Doom3!! Only once in a TDM-FM, but I can´t remember what mission it was. The interesting part:

To prevent the bug I only saved then in Doom3 in the main menu, and really some times after the save the menu-music disappeared!! And it wouldn´t come back, but this way I could keep the game-ambients. I had the impression that this was caused by massive use of ambients, though it doesn´t makes sense then for the menu-music, does it?

Edited October 11, 2010 by LEGION