[Kde-games-devel] Regarding the latest messages about regressions...

[Mathias Kraus]

Mauricio Piacentini schrieb am Dienstag 15 Dezember 2009:
> We all know that Phonon is not perfect for games (by design), but all
> the other games are using it right now. So I believe it would be safer
> if you use Phonon as a backup to Gluon, instead or the new and polemic
> QAudio. Otherwise we would be soon using at least 3 different sound
> APIs on kdegames, which is not good...

well, you're right, on both. I hoped to be able to replace gluon and phonon 
with QAudio, to rely only on Qt but I noticed soon, that it is too low level. 
for the purpose of games it's better than phonon, but you can't for example 
use ogg files but only wav/pcm and there is some rattle noise at the beginning 
of the sound. the good thing is, that it uses much less memory than a phonon 
instance and it is possible to consecutively play sound very quick without a 
lag.

from the three possibilities, the gluon one is the best from my POV. it's 
neither too low level nor too high level, just right for games and it has a 
very convenient API. you just have to create a KALSound instance, load the 
sound file to the KALSound instance and call play(). that's it. you can create 
an instance for each sound file and the memory footprint is still quite low.

conclusion for me is, that I will go back to phonon for the gluon fallback and 
I hope the gluon guys manage to do a release with KDE SC 4.4 and the 
distributions deliver packages.

for the future, I strongly encourage to use gluon for sound, especially if you 
have to consecutively play sound very quick. phonon gives some games an 
unpolished impression.  take kapman for example. the player eats consecutively 
many pills but there are many sound dropouts. sometimes the player eats more 
than 4 or 5 pills, but no sound is played.
I just wanted to know how it sounds with gluon and after 20 minutes of coding 
I got a much better sound experience.

regards,
mathias