KGoldrunner silenced in KDE 4.6 RC1

[Ian Wadham]

Thanks very much for your prompt and helpful reply, Harald.

On Monday 03 January 2011 2:05:02 pm Harald Sitter wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 5:30 AM, Ian Wadham <iandw.au at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hm, maybe should give in to the addiction and start playing the game 24/7

I would not wish that on you.  I have been addicted for nearly 30 years, from
old Apple II days!  That's why I originally submitted KGoldrunner to KDE.

> When I tried it [KGoldrunner] (for some 20 minutes or so) I did not notice
> any late sounds with gstreamer. It might however also be that either the
> gstreamer lib itself is at fault or our current git version contains
> improvement for that, though I could not imagine what change could
> have had influence on that sort of thing.
> 
My gstreamer is rather old I think, v0.10.24, installed here on 9 Aug 2009.
Would that make a difference?  Does Phonon support that version?

I tried disabling footstep sounds in my source code and then falling sounds.
There was less delay in each case, but delays of several seconds were starting
to occur within a minute or two, near the end of the first level in the demo,
and the delays got longer and longer, ending up with sounds being missed
altogether, such as the "pop up ladders" sound and the "win level" sound.

I think the problem sets in when actions requiring sounds start to overlap.
For example, there is an overlap of falling and collecting gold near the start
of the first demo level.  It fails to play correctly, but the collect-gold
sound is OK if the falling sound is disabled.  However, this may be a
wild goose chase.  My development versions of kdelibs, Qt and phonon
are at least 6 months old at present.

> By the way, you can check the backend in use via systemsettings'
> multimedia category, which by default should show the Phonon KCM with
> a  'backend' tab.
> 
OK, did that.  My installed release of KDE shows its Phonon backend is Xine
and (version?) number 0.2.60, on Multimedia->Backend settings tab.  Release
is KDE 4.3.5, installed here in August 2009.  KGoldrunner sounds are OK in
that version except for footsteps not being played.  But see also the crash in
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260262 for roughly same versions.

> > I thought I fixed the "inaudible footsteps" problem in trunk on July 2009
> > by changing the longer sounds to *.ogg files but keeping very short
> > sounds (<0.5sec) as *.wav (rev 991088).  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.
> 
> Well, very short sounds usually are even smaller in wav than they
> would be in OGG-Vorbis in my experience so that makes perfect sense :)
> What worries me though is that there are general problems with
> inaudibility... I'll try to look into this for Phonon 4.4.4 (schedule
> sometime soonish). Do you have any idea what other games are affected
> by this?
> 
Well, people have been grizzling about sound on the KDE Games list for
as long as I can remember (about 8 years).  We did hope Phonon would
be the answer when Luciano Montanaro programmed sounds for KGoldrunner
in 20008, but at Akademy 2008 in Belgium in Aug 2008 there were grumbles
about the performance of sound synchronisation and overlap in games.

Some recent posts suggest that short sounds are or have been a problem
in kbounce, kpat and kajongg (a new KDE game written in Python).  For
example http://marc.info/?l=kde-games-devel&m=128247297409838&w=2

Of these KBounce is the most sound-intensive.  The other two are a
patience/solitaire game and a (real Chinese) Mahjongg table game.
Some other sound-intensive games are Kapman and Granatier, but
I do not know how they are performing re sound.

Then there is my own humble offering, the forerunner of *this* thread:
http://marc.info/?l=kde-games-devel&m=129254994812050&w=2
http://marc.info/?l=kde-games-devel&m=129275650802502&w=2

Stefan Majewsky is developing a new games library called Tagaro and
is offering a unit called TagaroAudio which is currently available for
testing, though I have not tried it.  IIUC TagaroAudio interfaces to OpenAL
direct.  Others are pushing the Gluon library and GluonAudio from time
to time, but I have not tried them either.  See:
http://marc.info/?l=kde-games-devel&m=128410535913761&w=2
http://marc.info/?l=kde-games-devel&m=128487706829568&w=2
http://marc.info/?l=kde-games-devel&m=128544817912056&w=2

One of KDE Games leading contributors, Mauricio Piacentini, called our
attention to a thread on KDE Multimedia which seems to state sound
requirements quite well, not just for games:
http://marc.info/?l=kde-games-devel&m=129121861326836&w=2
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-multimedia&m=129128828012537&w=2
See Mauricio's and George Kiagiadakis' posts on the kde-mm thread.

> > Maybe I am using very old backends and that is the problem.  Please
> > let me know what you would like me to try next.
> 
> Well, it would be awesome if you could test with latest git version of
> phonon and phonon-gstreamer
> git://anongit.kde.org/phonon
> git://anongit.kde.org/phonon-gstreamer
>
I'll try, but that might be hard for me.  I have lost touch with KDE trunk
development in the last few months, nor have I been reading kde-devel
or kde-core-devel for several months.  I was travelling a lot and also
occupied with financial and family matters.  And I am getting old.  I will
be 73 soon.  I did learn about git about 6 months ago but have now
forgotten it all, mainly through not using it yet, but also because it will
be about my ninth or tenth revision control system and it gets harder
as time goes on to overlay old memory with new.

The problem remains --- what to do with KGoldrunner being silenced in
the KDE 4.6 RC1 release.  Final Tag for KDE 4.6 is 19 Jan 2011.  I am
worried about re-enabling sound after Parker Coates' post:
http://marc.info/?l=kde-games-devel&m=129259235517261&w=2

I cannot risk the released version of the game being completely
unplayable because of some problem with the sound.  And the bug
report mentioned above is also a worry, but I cannot reproduce it.
Sound should not make a game run slow and then crash ...

All the best, Ian W.

P.S. Please could  someone moderate my messages on this thread.
I am not subscribed to KDE Multimedia.