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[Sensei]

It occurred to me whens seeing that the "QUALITY!" in the intro was a .ogg sound file, that Toady might be wise to switch to .wav for short sound effects.

What is the long term benefit of this? It would make simple to add sound effects over the existing background music, without interrupting anything. .WAV is used by a lot of shooters as the file format of choice gunshot sounds, which come up frequently over other sounds.

Now, I'm not suggesting we need sound effects for dwarves mining or anything. But, easy audio alerts to things like artifacts being completed, caravans arriving, striking ores, and so on would make it less likely for players to miss announcements. Obviously, these could be turned on and off in the init file.

[Foa]

Yeah, this would improve the whole, ADD SFX ALERTS, AND SITUATIONAL BGM thing.

[Derakon]

OGG and WAV are both usable, but OGG is more flexible, since you can use it for short sound effects and for lengthier things like music and dialog (you just know that eventually DF is going to include a speech synthesizer!). I'm not aware of any particular reason why WAV is better than OGG for short sounds, and it'd be better, for consistency's sake if nothing else, to only use one sound format.

[Footkerchief]

For context:

# Core21, SOUND, (Future): Make all music/sounds optional, in groups. More songs (possibly seasonal), incidental music (like spotting the first kobold in a cave, etc.), various combat type sounds and ambient sounds, pleasing interface clicks.
# Bloat277, SOUND EVENTS, (Future): Removal of annoying off-screen combat spam and replacement with sound events that have displayed locations. Selection of the sound event might show a further breakdown of associated announcements. Might be very useful if screen is blanked out on blinding.

[profit]

Ogg and wave files appearently can both be sent directly into an OpenAL buffer.
So except for the decode time associated with and Ogg-Vorbis file compared to a wave file which is often in uncompressed Pulse Code Modulation, they should be nearly the same. Probably slightly less latency using uncompressed waves and probably a little more memory usage...

[Blacken]

It occurred to me whens seeing that the "QUALITY!" in the intro was a .ogg sound file, that Toady might be wise to switch to .wav for short sound effects.

What is the long term benefit of this? It would make simple to add sound effects over the existing background music, without interrupting anything. .WAV is used by a lot of shooters as the file format of choice gunshot sounds, which come up frequently over other sounds.

Not really. The overwhelming majority of engines support WAV and AIFF because supporting them is trivial, but most games use MP3 or OGG for PCM-encoded sound effects. They are used because they are compressed. Using WAV provides zero benefit except an entirely undetectable difference in sound quality. (For files of the size being discussed, decode time is negligible. It's trivial to spin off a sound queue into another thread, anyway, so it shouldn't matter.)

Now, I'm not suggesting we need sound effects for dwarves mining or anything. But, easy audio alerts to things like artifacts being completed, caravans arriving, striking ores, and so on would make it less likely for players to miss announcements. Obviously, these could be turned on and off in the init file.

This has nothing to do with file type; you can make a two-second OGG file just as easily as you can make a twenty-minute one. These two topics seem unrelated.

[profit]

It's trivial to spin off a sound queue into another thread, anyway, so it shouldn't matter.)

Yeah, it may be trivial, but NOTHING has been broken off into a separate thread ANYWHERE in dwarf fortress... I seriously doubt it will start now.  Would be nice.. but it's not gonna happen.

(I know it says there are 4 threads while DF is running... I am betting they are the 3 threads started by compiling a program with boost... Let me check battle champs.... Hmm I musta removed its source, anyhow I cant imagine toad would compile without using the boost libraries since they handle so much low level I/O crap.)

[Blacken]

It's trivial to spin off a sound queue into another thread, anyway, so it shouldn't matter.)

Yeah, it may be trivial, but NOTHING has been broken off into a separate thread ANYWHERE in dwarf fortress... I seriously doubt it will start now.  Would be nice.. but it's not gonna happen.

(I know it says there are 4 threads while DF is running... I am betting they are the 3 threads started by compiling a program with boost... Let me check battle champs.... Hmm I musta removed its source, anyhow I cant imagine toad would compile without using the boost libraries since they handle so much low level I/O crap.)

Doesn't Baughn's stuff run in its own thread?

And besides--you only decode once.

[profit]

The sound sample is decoded JIT every time it plays... but it's not any more intensive than playing an MP3.  Just might cause some latency and may cause a hesitation in the game if it isn't dumped on another thread *Which will not happen by design, maybe by chance*

Besides that? I really don't know too much about openAL.. Honestly I don't know that toad is even using it... just seems likely that he is seeing he uses openGL already.

[Pilsu]

Now, I'm not suggesting we need sound effects for dwarves mining or anything.

Hearing dwarves mine, party etc would add a lot to the game in my opinion

[madrain]

Hearing dwarfs mine would be torture.  I keep more than one miner in my fort and they are often working in the same area at the same time.  80+ clinks a minute?  No thank you.

Hearing a dwarf drown when falling into a river, hearing one scream when falling into magma, hearing one weep when its baby is killed by a goblin.. now that would be boss.

[Pilsu]

Obviously the sounds wouldn't overlap.

[Alexhans]

remember Warcraft 2?  Those sounds were pretty cool... For a while...

As they said... ogg -> compression and quality.

Wav's superior quality can only be noticed if you have some nice earphones and some good ears...

[Pilsu]

Well, if they get annoying, one could always turn them off. Or replace the most annoying ones with blank files

I don't think it'd be that grating to hear a faint tinking sound when seeing dwarves mine on screen

[sproingie]

DF is definitely not using OpenAL, and more than likely it's using SDL's mixer.  OpenAL has little to do with OpenGL other than having an API that's inspired by OpenGL.  It's not maintained by the same organization as OpenGL.  OpenGL is used in DF because it's the only way to get a decently fast framebuffer these days. 

Positioned sounds would be nice though (think every Impressions/Tilted Mill game), so count me in as a vote for OpenAL if and when sound effects are added.