The sound issue...

Rxke · Post by **Rxke** » Mon Feb 27, 2006 10:18 am

OSX 10.3.9, Oolite 1.62

So.... After having disabled the speech-synth, things seemed rock-stable. Until today, when I shot a baddie, and it blew up, the game froze...
"Aaargh!" I thought, and went to the console, only to see that it kept updating, so I went back to the game, and it still worked! Although w/o sound...
Initially, it seemed to struggle, everytime a sound event happened, it crawled to a snail's pace (yea, crawling snails, sorry)
But after awhile, it ran a *little* bit faster, so I fuel-injected out of the fight, towards the station, only to discover shift-D didn't work anymore. So I docked manually, only to get the 'all hands' alert from the Thargoiddwars OXP, Darn, so I exited station, stuff crawling to sub 4FPS, so I fuel injected to another system, hoping the vincinity to their station would be less crowded, giving me a chance to manually dock, and..; There shift-D worked again

Of course, console kept churning out gazillions of

OOCASoundMixer: failed to connect channel <OOCASoundChannel 0x1384c10>{ID=31, state=stopped, sound=<OOCABufferedSound 0x4f52c20>{"afterburner1.ogg"}}, error = kAudioUnitErr_CannotDoInCurrentContext/kAUGraphErr_CannotDoInCurrentContext/kAUGraphErr_CannotDoInCurrentContext.

and after awhile this gem:

Out of sound channels! Pretend you're hearing afterburner2.ogg

(lots of those, also...)

So.. Long story short: it's not the voice-synth, but this time it didn't hang (only momentarily, but recovered) and it is far less frequent than when using Oolite w/ voicesynth...
BTW: somebody reported this behaviour too, IIRC, on a laptop.

Murgh · Post by **Murgh** » Mon Feb 27, 2006 10:29 am

Rxke wrote:
BTW: somebody reported this behaviour too, IIRC, on a laptop

yes, I did, on a iBook G4 panther with the minimum RAM.

but few and far between. and I couldn't reprouduce it when piling up with the conditions I suspected..

never saw the "pretend" message though

Evil Juice · Post by **Evil Juice** » Mon Feb 27, 2006 2:09 pm

i did it also, g3 ibook, 128mb, 10.3.9, oolite 1.62 PPC. The very same behaviour. The pretend message never came out, i would have liked to see it.

Rxke · Post by **Rxke** » Mon Feb 27, 2006 2:16 pm

Ah, yes, it was you I was thinking of, Evil.

I've got 384Mb, not a lot, but more than sufficient, from the looks of it, still have a good chunk memory free...

JensAyton · Post by **JensAyton** » Mon Feb 27, 2006 4:55 pm

It seems to be some sort of synchronisation issue in the code. When a sound channel (technically an output audio unit) is finished playing, it’s supposed to be stopped an disconnected form the mixer by the ”reaper” thread, then returned to the pool of free channels. The CannotDoInCurrentContext error indicates that the stopping didn’t happen, but the channel was put in the pool anyway and the sound system tried to play a new sound through it. I need to work out why.

The “pretend” message happens when the pool is empty, i.e. when all sound channels are in use. If the sound system were working properly, it would only happen when you had more than 32 sounds playing at once, which would hopefully never happen, so it’s a kind of easter egg. If you see this happening more than once in a blue moon when you’re not having the CannotDoInCurrentContext errors, I’d like to hear about it.

Shift-D not working is probably an artifact of low frame rates; these can make it hard for key combos to be recognised.

Rxke · Post by **Rxke** » Mon Feb 27, 2006 5:07 pm

Ahruman wrote:
If you see this happening more than once in a blue moon when you’re not having the CannotDoInCurrentContext errors, I’d like to hear about it.

Shift-D not working is probably an artifact of low frame rates; these can make it hard for key combos to be recognised.

I don't think that'll happen, it only started to happen when the CannotDo in etc... stuff was filling the screen, and i kept flying around, doing all kinds of stuff that 'makes a noise' (but there was no sound) (esp. fuel-inject) so I guess in the end, it 'saturated' , running out of channels.

re: shift-D, I thought that too, stupid enough didn't test this w/ shift-F

Rxke · Post by **Rxke** » Tue Mar 07, 2006 4:52 pm

Ahruman wrote:
Shift-D not working is probably an artifact of low frame rates; these can make it hard for key combos to be recognised.

Now I'm starting to doubt that...
It happened again, and surely, it causes low framerates, but I was able to use shift-F w/o a problem. Jumping to another system somehow ends the low framerates 'cause' :s But there too, shift-D didn't work at all.

Rxke · Post by **Rxke** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 5:13 pm

I got the sound problem again, BUT: it just complained in Console a bit, and EVEN BETTER: it then behaved again as if nothing had happened!

Nice one Ahruman, kudos!

For the record: Console showed:

Code: Select all

2006-03-22 18:00:13.369 Oolite[407] Channel <OOCASoundChannel 0x1388310>{ID=9, state=broken (-10863), sound=<OOCABufferedSound 0x4e49b00>{"laser.ogg"}} broke with error kAudioUnitErr_CannotDoInCurrentContext/kAUGraphErr_CannotDoInCurrentContext/kAUGraphErr_CannotDoInCurrentContext.

2006-03-22 18:00:13.477 Oolite[407] OOCASoundMixer: failed to connect channel <OOCASoundChannel 0x1388310>{ID=9, state=stopped, sound=<OOCABufferedSound 0x4e49b00>{"laser.ogg"}}, error = kAUGraphErr_InvalidConnection.

etc. etc.

What happened in-game: (I was) lasering a Thargoid, all of a sudden lasersound stops, but no slowing down of game-engine, and sound picked up againg quite swiftly after the 'hiccup'.

JensAyton · Post by **JensAyton** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 12:02 am

Well, it’s an improvement. I can’t say I’m happy with it, since I still don’t understand how it’s getting into the wrong ”state”. :-/

JensAyton · Post by **JensAyton** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 1:21 am

Actually, I think I do know how it’s getting in the wrong state. Not surprisingly, it’s down to me being thick. ;-) The next step is to fix it in a way which doesn’t cause a new cascade of bugs.