[Kde-games-devel] Sound in kdegames?

[Luciano Montanaro]

2008/8/18 Kevin Krammer <kevin.krammer at gmx.at>:
> On Sunday 17 August 2008, Eugene Trounev wrote:
>> According to Phonon (ex)developer that's what he's offered TT to begin with
>> (a complete multimedia solution), but they don't want that. The only
>> purpose of Phonon is to abstract the sound output well enough for it to be
>> easily accessible on Windows/Mac/Unix. They are not interested in a
>> complete multimedia solution. Their main reason for this - they are not a
>> multimedia company (no games, and such), and the most apps only need a very
>> basic sound support.
>
> Actually it is the other way around.
>
> Matthias told me that at the last meeting he had with TT folks they suggested
> doing a "can do everything" multimedia API instead, but Matthias told them
> that Phonon was never intended nor designed for that purpose.
>
>> As for the development continuation - TT will be maintaining the code for
>> now, until a new dev is found/old one returns (maybe).
>
> The way I understood it Matthias wants to concentrate on finishing his studies
> so someone at TT takes maintainership for libphonon additionally to the
> backends they already maintain.
>
> Matthias also hinted that would be returning most likely as a TT employee
> after graduating.

I was at the phonon bof too. From what I understood, the next
"feature" release of phonon by trolltech is scheduled for Qt4.6, that
is in the KDE 4.4 timeframe. And as Kevin puts it, Phonon focus is on
media streaming; it can easily be used for notifications, but for
*some* games it is a bad fit.

Actually, I think it may still be ok for many of the games we ship at
the moment; it's not good enough in principle for action games with
lots of sound effects.

Matthias suggested trying out OpenAL for the actual sound output,
together with the new capabilities of phonon to output the samples to
a sound buffer instead of towards the sound card. I've still to check
the new interfaces, but it looks like an acceptable solution.

Actually, it could give us much richer sound effects that could be
possible now or with the other, simpler crossplatform solution
(SDL_Mixer). I understand MacOSX is also using it as part of its audio
architecture; and it should be available on Windows too.

I would like to try to experiment with it for KGoldrunner. I suppose
once it works there, we could talk about extending it to cover the
needs of other games and moving it to libkdegames.

I think Phonon could still be used when no openAL library could be detected.



-- 
Luciano Montanaro

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