KGoldrunner silenced in KDE 4.6 RC1

[Ian Wadham]

On Tuesday 28 December 2010 5:15:16 am Harald Sitter wrote:
> I just tried with Phonon from git master (which is not that different from
> recently released 4.4.3) and the GStreamer backend works perfectly, Xine
> almost does (except that for some reason the walking sounds do not get
> played). I was not able to get it to freeze, crash or play sounds delayed
> though. So, this would indicate that it is rather a setup issue than
>  anything else...
>
I thought I fixed the "inaudible footsteps" problem in July 2009 by changing
the longer sounds to *.ogg files but keeping very short sounds (<0.5sec)
as *.wav (rev 91088).  That has become something of a "rule of thumb" in
KDE Games, but lately I seem to remember other games having problems
with very short and frequent sounds being inaudible.

 >  - I have no idea how Phonon works, so I have no idea how to investigate
> >    the problem with it in KGoldrunner.  It's a library and I am an
> > application developer, so I expect it to "just work".
> 
> The best thing would be to turn on Phonon debugging by exporting a couple
>  of environment variables, get a log and then send it to
>  kde-multimedia at kde.org or report a bug, usually this should give a pretty
>  good idea of what is wrong.
> 
> export PHONON_PULSEAUDIO_DEBUG=5
> export PHONON_VLC_DEBUG=5
> export PHONON_GST_DEBUG=5
> export PHONON_XINE_DEBUG=5
> export PHONON_DEBUG=5
> 
I'll give this a go with my months-old KDE and Qt libraries before trying
to update them.

> >  - Somebody else wrote the code for KGoldrunner's sound feature, back
> >    in 2008.  It has never worked excellently for everybody and I believe
> > the Phonon authors have said that Phonon was never designed for use in
> > games.
> 
> Since it works here, I doubt the issue is with the KGoldrunner
>  implementation, but rather in either the Phonon backend in use (or the
>  underlying multimedia framework).
>
That's what I was thinking.  Not a line of the KGoldrunner code for sound
has changed in KDE 4.6.

BTW KGoldrunner as at KDE 4.3.5, with the Phonon and Xine backend of
OpenSuSE 11.2 distribution works fine for me too.  I just have the one Xine
backend (v 1.1.16.1-7.6) for both desktop (KDE 4.3.5) and development
(KDE 4.6), but the KDE 4.6 (development) KGoldrunner has several missing
or mis-timed sounds and the KDE 4.3.5 version does sounds beautifully.

> I must however mention that I noticed one particular bug, which is that the
> playback of sounds does not get stopped on level switch, so if one is
>  moving down a long ladder and starts a new game, the sound will not stop
>  immediately.
> 
Heh!  I have been too lazy to fix that, but I see you have.  Thanks, Harald.

All the best, Ian W.

P.S. Please CC me: I am not subscribed to kde-multimedia.