Our ReVolt Pub

Bug Report

sound effects are being dropped (not played) or replaced by the skidding sound. firework, bomb fuse, electroshock, battery, are most effected.

i tried 48 channels and it didnt improve, 64 channels seemed to actually make it worse.

using v150131, but the bug goes all the way back to v121225.

^are you saying this issue would occur in standard gameplay or have you found a special case/configuration that triggers it?

Because I never came across this described issue in normal play (ranging from the mentioned v121225 to latest v150131), at least not that I'm aware of (but I would be surprised if it was the case and has gone unnoticed all this time).

Also perhaps post your hardware specs if it happens in default gameplay for you?

ThugsRook is right. I have experienced that issue so many times that I thought it was a problem from Miles Sound System or something like that. And I always run the maximum possible number of SFX channels (I do not know why, lol).

I'll try to record my races just to catch the bug.

Kenny ~ nothing special, happens all the time.

WXP32 SP3 / SoundBlaster Live 5.1 (no eax or effects are enabled)

Huh, I always thought that was a wine issue and didn't bother reporting it.

Are other people occasionally getting distorted sounds as well, where effects (most notably battery and shock, haven't noticed fuse doing it but then again that's just noise) play at ~1/2 speed and prevent other sounds from playing? Might be related.

I get sound distortions sometimes too, especially when skidding. I would say it's due to high fps (playing with v-sync turned off for a reason; and game fps counter usually shows ~500fps).
Of course, I never play the game with locked 60fps, so I can't say if I'm right for sure.

I never really heard any distortions when I used to play on my old PC, which barely ran the game at 60fps.

[Edit]: Thought it wasn't exactly v-sync, at least I've tried.

Never heard of an issue described by Thugs, at least it definitely didn't happened all the time...

@VaiD: I doubt sound issues can be related to the graphics performance, it sounds ridiculous, because they are played completely separate from render stuff...

nevermind @ Feb 13 2015, 10:16 PM wrote: ThugsRook is right. I have experienced that issue so many times that I thought it was a problem from Miles Sound System or something like that. And I always run the maximum possible number of SFX channels (I do not know why, lol).

+1

(I think i started heard this since i play revolt from XP, never heard it with win 98)

For what it's worth, I don't have vsync enabled either because it's broken in wine.

Also not "all the time" per se, more like two or three times every 5-10 races (at least in my experience, not sure how frequent it is for others). Just frequent enough to be an irritation

That is not a vsync reason, as I do have it enabled.

I'm sure the sfx being dropped (especially battery, zap, etc) happened in original versions too (I too thought it could be Miles issue). But in fact I got it (only once so far) in rvgl too. So it's likely to be a sfx engine issue that we should look into later.

Btw, it's better to open a separate thread for each bug report (I'll be splitting this shortly).
Done.

ThugsRook @ 13 Feb 2015, 08:58 PM wrote:sound effects are being dropped (not played) or replaced by the skidding sound. firework, bomb fuse, electroshock, battery, are most effected.

Well, I've never been able to reproduce it (mostly using my own dev build but this should not be relevant), with 12 players in eg. Toy World 2. I have to say that I never reach really high FPS, that could be a reason.

Dropped sound actually occured for me, but only when the number of Audio Channels is too low. You can try to play in DEV mode (-dev switch on the command line), with the F9 key panel displayed, there's a message when the SFX channels are full (though if you have setup Re-Volt Audio to use 64 channels I doubt you'll see it).

Sometime the sounds are also just to far to be heard. You can eg. see an explosion but not hear it, I think that's a limitation of Re-Volt engine, not really a bug.

We'll have to wait for a video capture of this bug to have a better idea.

Even with 64 i managed to get full sound slots (try it by spamming weapons)

I have just recorded a video with an example of the issue. The sound is way out of sync and the file is too big right now, so I will upload it when I sort that out. I got it by playing Botanical Garden in Clockwork Carnage mode and launching the zap. The wrong thing was not that the zap sound did not play (which is normal if no SFX channel is free), but the fact that it seems to be replaced by the sound of skidding with abnormal modulations, as if RV was crazy.

I have not found an easy way to reproduce the bug yet, but I have found a way to reproduce the strange modulation of the skidding sound: enter a Clockwork Carnage race in Botanical Garden using SADIST cheat. Launch the zap or the battery at any moment at the first seconds of the race - for example, while you are turning right at the first corner. The sound will probably* change its tone as other cars move and you approach places where ambience sounds are generated (you may play normally, or you may even wait for the CPU cars to be turning right and then you launch the battery and try to catch them, that way the modulations turn very easy to spot). The way it modules is quite similar to the way skid sounds module when experiencing the bug.

* Sometimes it does not play at all (not even the skidding sound), sometimes it just works well. That may depend on the number of free SFX channels. It seems that the lower the number of SFX channels, the lower the chance of getting a strange sound (as the probability of not getting any sound is higher).

Just to clarify, is it always the skidding sound that is played (distorted) instead or are there other sound effects that are incorrectly played?

And is it only triggered by weapons or did someone experience a situation where some other sound effect triggered it (like the beachball bump or piano sound effect in Toy Worlds 2 or cars picking up pickups)?

it only happens with weapons.
no bug when racing w/o them.

I do not remember that it has happened with anything but weapons. And I do not remember any strange sound but the skid ones (both skid_normal and skid_rough, depending on the floor, but that happens even if your car is stopped).

Ok, I did get slight weird modulation doing what nevermind described in Bot.Garden using 15.0211, but it was rather subtle in my case, and I couldn't get any sound replaced by another so far...

Yeah, no sounds are replaced, but I am pretty sure that the skid sound behaves like that when the bug is triggered. The modulation seems to depend on the surrounding sounds; it might get really obvious or even maddening.

The bug we are talking about is not that common, and as it seems to happen when lots of sounds are near, playing Botanical Garden in Clockwork Carnage mode might trigger it about one time in every 6 races or so.

I also tried what nevermind suggested (6+ times) and like jigebren said, I wasn't able to make the electrostatic sound not play (or rather get played as a skid sound effect) but there were indeed some distortions with the electro static sound effect sometimes (not really bothering but noticable).

Are you sure though that the electro static sound gets actually replaced by the skid effect and doesn't just completely drop out?
Because especially in those first few seconds in Botanical Garden there is a lot of skidding going on by the cars in the first corner.

Kenny @ 4 Mar 2015, 05:06 PM wrote: Are you sure though that the electro static sound gets actually replaced by the skid effect and doesn't just completely drop out?

yes, absolutely possitively sure.

and it can happen on any track, not just Garden.

I've already founded out that something was going wrong with the sfx, as I had the proof that sometime an sfx was used instead of another. It couldn't notice it just by playing though (probably because it was mostly skid and scrape sounds that get mixed up), but I could see it by checking the value in memory... But it took me an incredible amount of work to locate the reason. The sound management in Re-Volt is quite a mess, I hope we'll improve that with RVGL...

It was jut when I was about to give up that I tried another method that put me on the right track. (@revolting, please, share a good sentence with us about that...)
Now, the safety tests I have added to the code for that purpose are no longer triggered (so far), that's a good sign. The weird thing is, on my first try of the "nevermind's protocol" above, I had the feeling the Turbo sound modulation was even more noticeable than before...

But at least there's something definitively fixed. Use the SADIST cheat in DEV mode in a recent build (as the DEV mode now forces SADIST to use the same last weapon on next key press), select the pack of firework, and shoot 3 times, reload, shoot 3 times, etc.
In previous builds, even with 64 SFX channels, after a few shot the fireworks should no longer emit a sound. With my last fix it now works.

The video (5.18 MB). Pay attention to the weird skid sound right before the zap hits several cars.

[HIDE=Offtopic]Awesome Jig: "Don't give up on RV if you do it it may sense it, and give up in itself" you gotta have faith in your little son (RV) [/HIDE]
[Vaid]: Marked as offtopic, because it has nothing to do with this particular bug report. Use HIDE tag next time if you are only posting sentences with 'quotes'.

[HIDE=Offtopic]

revolting @ 6 Mar 2015, 07:38 PM wrote: Awesome Jig: "Don't give up on RV if you do it it may sense it, and give up in itself" you gotta have faith in your little son (RV)

Seriously, Why are you still mixing religion with re-volt?

[Vaid]: Where do you see religion reference here?

Look how he typed it, in a religious way, you didn't read the bible?

[Vaid]: Well, looking at his older posts, this one isn't that obvious, at least.
[/HIDE]

Well, after searching for it for days, I may gave finally pinned something about the remaining glitches I still had... I'll clean up the code and see whether it's definitively ok or not (yet).

Thanks nevermind for the video. You mean the little skwitch skwitch, like some little birds noise?
It's hard to know, as there's was some much possibilities the original sound code could fails. But it should have been improved in several ways now, so we'll see after the next v1.2 release.

[HIDE=Offtopic]I did it because Jig asked me, still the sentence didn't have anything to do with religion it's about RV

Jig: it was jut when I was about to give up that I tried another method that put me on the right track. smile.gif (@revolting, please, share a good sentence with us about that...)

[/HIDE]
[HIDE=Vaid:]I simply marked as offtopic, because your post does not have any reply/response related with sound bug, that's why I said: "has nothing to do with this particular bug report". If it had, I wouldn't have marked it. And I understand very well that Jig asked you. Excuse me if I didn't pointed that out clearly. Not trying to be strict here by all means, just mark less important, not related posts.
If you have any questions regarding this subject, feel free to contact me privately.[/HIDE]

[HIDE=Offtopic]
@revolting, yeah don't worry for this time, though it was some kind of joke, I did ask.

@vaid, congrats, ORP feels like a safer place since you're in the staff. [/HIDE]

I had a weird sound when starting a Clockwork race though, I couldn't understand why... In fact, I believe the bugfixes actually enables all the cars sound to be properly played at the same time, it means at starting grid all the clockworks engine sounds suddenly sum up, and that gives that weird result (maybe it's clipping, I don't know). I used a quick trick without much hope: each car engine is played with a slightly modified frequency (so as to break the coherence), and the weird sound seems gone.
Well, I may have to keep this trick for clockwork mode...

I'm marking it as solved. We'll see how it goes in next release.

Cool Jig, thanks to you guys Revolt is gonna be floppy no more