DRD Team

Hi, me again, simpler to post when registered. I created a fix.wad containing this MAPINFO:
And a SBARINFO containing all lines from sbarinfo/doom.txt with this add:
The automap HUD is gone, but the automap text has turned gold instead of red.

Note: you can delete my none-registered replies.

2 issues with openal:

1) Mods with a lot of OGG sounds, which have long loading time (for example like this one viewtopic.php?f=24&t=7103&p=61064#p59957 ) now have much more loading time, approximately 3x longer than fmod
2) World/waterfall sound now play at high volume in heretic (if you remember, fmod options contain "underwater cutoff" option, but openal doesn't)

If you are interested to investigate/fix those issues I can create bugreports with testmods for you

I can't do much about the Ogg load times. The 3x increase is what I reliably got when comparing libsndfile with FMod's internal Ogg loader.

About the sound effect processing, it's a completely different processing engine so some differences are to be expected. Yes, the underwater sound is different but I cannot really say I ever liked the overdone effect that was implemented for FMod (for the sole reason that it COULD be implemented like that, not because it was a good idea.) What's there in OpenAL is a lot more restrained and doesn't mess up the entire sound into something unrecognizable.

Graf Zahl wrote: ↑Tue May 02, 2017 9:12 I can't do much about the Ogg load times. The 3x increase is what I reliably got when comparing libsndfile with FMod's internal Ogg loader.

ok

Graf Zahl wrote: ↑Tue May 02, 2017 9:12 Yes, the underwater sound is different but I cannot really say I ever liked the overdone effect that was implemented for FMod

I think I misunderstood one thing, so I'm sorry for that. As I understand now, the issue I told above is not related to "underwater cutoff" option in fmod (because during reproducing this issue I was above the water, not under it)

Let me explain this issue with video: https://youtu.be/VNPw2ycGQ3M

So, as you can see in the video, world/waterfall sound plays as expected in fmod and silences all other sounds in openal (so I only hear waterfall sound and it is harder to hear and recognize other sounds)

So, to fix this issue, I created next workaround in SNDINFO:

$volume world/waterfall 0.3 //OPENAL FIX

Of course it is not as good as in fmod, but at least it doesn't silences other sounds, so I can easily hear them

How many waterfall sounds does that level have? The sound is so overwhelming that I'd say there's far too many of them to begin with.
Also, what operating system are you using?

Excuse me, about my mod without automap HUD, the automap texts color has turned yellow, how can I turned it back to red, please?

Graf Zahl wrote: ↑Tue May 02, 2017 14:54 Also, what operating system are you using?

Windows 7 x64 Ultimate

Graf Zahl wrote: ↑Tue May 02, 2017 14:54 How many waterfall sounds does that level have? The sound is so overwhelming that I'd say there's far too many of them to begin with.

I'm sorry to say, but I'm not familiar with doom map editors and don't know how to watch the amount of sound emitters in the maps. This map is E2M10 of Masters of Chaos 1.1: https://zdoom.org/wiki/Masters_of_Chaos

Also I posted this directly to map author, wanna hear his opinion too: https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f ... 90#p994556

P.S. In the sound options there is "sound channels", and minimum value is 64 now (previously, in 2.4.0, minimum was . Is this by design? For example if I dont want sound spam, how I can reduce the number of channels now?

Yes, that is intentional. 8 simply doesn't work anymore with modern sound engines.

E2M10 contains 119 waterfall sound objects. And even with distance attenuation this just adds up to an overwhelming sound field when in the vicinity of them.
I'd say this can be written off as bad map design.

Graf Zahl wrote: ↑Tue May 02, 2017 17:52 Yes, that is intentional. 8 simply doesn't work anymore with modern sound engines.

Graf Zahl wrote: ↑Tue May 02, 2017 17:56 E2M10 contains 119 waterfall sound objects. And even with distance attenuation this just adds up to an overwhelming sound field when in the vicinity of them.
I'd say this can be written off as bad map design.

Got it, thanks. Hope Caleb will fix it in moc 1.2

Graf Zahl wrote: ↑Tue May 02, 2017 9:12 I can't do much about the Ogg load times. The 3x increase is what I reliably got when comparing libsndfile with FMod's internal Ogg loader.

Which sound format you recommend to use with GZDoom for best compatibility and user experience with openal?

It doesn't really matter. Ogg by itself isn't the actual problem, but you have to consider that an uncompressed Ogg sound is roughly 10x the size of the actual Ogg file and this just causes a much heavier load on the system even though the files are not really larger than Doom's original effects. What I'd recommend is adding the sounds to a precaching list in MAPINFO, then they'll get loaded on map start where it won't bog down performance. The individual load time for a single Ogg effect isn't that much, you could still load a few hundred of them at map start and it won't really be noticable with all the other stuff being loaded. It's just that loading a few effects live during gameplay can on occasion tale a bit longer than it is necessary to keep the game running smooothly.

Thanks! Also I'm curious: do you plan to add multithread sound loading in the future? And also maybe multithread loading of other things (3d models, textures, sprites, etc)

Sounds may be possible. Other things not so much, because the two aspects which cost the most (loading from HD and uploading to video memory cannot be multithreaded due to how OpenGL works.

With sounds it will definitely cause some lag when starting an unloaded sound for the first time, though.

About sounds I mean the case when you have a lot of sounds to precache, and 1 thread take for example 4 minutes for loading (so 4 threads will take only 1 minute)

If you have that many sounds to precache I'd say there's something wrong with the mod.
If I go from the upload speed on my system that'd be 6-7 hours of effects which would effectively occupy half your RAM.