KGoldrunner silenced in KDE 4.6 RC1

[Harald Sitter]

Hi Ian,

Am Montag, 27. Dezember 2010, um 10:37:36 schrieb Ian Wadham:
> See the recent thread "Sound problems in KGoldrunner" on the KDE Games
> list for details.  Basically, Phonon in KGoldrunner does not work for me,
> with trunk as at 30 June.  It works with up-to-date trunk for Andreas
> Pakulat but freezes up everything when the game starts for Parker Coates. 
> There is also recently reported https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260262
> for KDE 4.3 KGoldrunner, where Phonon/Xine crashed amid a huge tangle
> of threads.

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 do not know for sure how to build and install Phonon.  I think you are
>    supposed to install the Qt version then somehow install the KDE version
>    over the top of it (i.e. under $QTDIR) ... ???

This largely depends on the distribution actually. That said you do not have 
to build Qt with Phonon (of course without it Qt applications that use it 
might not work). Generally you can just build Phonon and install it in your 
KDE installation path and as long as the right Phonon library is loaded by 
your application it should just work.

>  - 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

>  - 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).
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.

> Can you give me any ideas or put me in touch with anyone who could help?

If you post some additional information to the kde-mm list I am sure we can 
get to the bottom of this and fix the problem :)

regards
-- 
Harald Sitter
Phonon Developer