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[methylatedspirit]

So, on my phone there's a setting for mono audio. With a headset plugged in through the headphone jack, it works normally. Using one that plugs in through USB-C, though, it blasts white noise at above max volume (it clips HARD) in addition to whatever you're listening to. How the hell did Samsung not find this bug? I know that using USB-C headphones wasn't really this phone's intended use, but still.

[Reelya]

USB headphone aren't getting the pure audio signal, they're digital. It's quite possible that it isn't the phone generating that signal but is a bug in the headphone's decoder.

Maybe the Samsung is just sending the mono signal out via analogue, but the headphones are assuming the signal is stereo, and maybe it has built-in normalization, so it amplifies the non-signal up to be ear-splitting white noise.

[McTraveller]

Reelya just beat me to it. My guess is the USB headphones don't know how to handle monaural so are doing something it shouldn't with the 'blank' channel.

[Reelya]

Yeah, I'd say the core problem is that the Samsung hardware and the headphones have a different idea about what the contract here is.

The Samsung phone outputs either mono or stereo and expects that it's the USB digital headphone's job to decipher the stream and work out how to produce sound from that, while the headphones be all "where's mah stereo?"

The headphones may have RAM buffers for each channel, and only one of them is being loaded with actual data, and since they're expected to be loaded with data from the USB they're not zeroed-out before loading.
So it's reading random junk from its own memory then trying to interpret that as sound data.

[McTraveller]

USB - adding new failure modes since 1995!

[scourge728]

Yeah, I'd say the core problem is that the Samsung hardware and the headphones have a different idea about what the contract here is.

The Samsung phone outputs either mono or stereo and expects that it's the USB digital headphone's job to decipher the stream and work out how to produce sound from that, while the headphones be all "where's mah stereo?"

The headphones may have RAM buffers for each channel, and only one of them is being loaded with actual data, and since they're expected to be loaded with data from the USB they're not zeroed-out before loading.
So it's reading random junk from its own memory then trying to interpret that as sound data.

So this glitch is the missingno of usb headphones?

[methylatedspirit]

Yeah, I'd say the core problem is that the Samsung hardware and the headphones have a different idea about what the contract here is.

The Samsung phone outputs either mono or stereo and expects that it's the USB digital headphone's job to decipher the stream and work out how to produce sound from that, while the headphones be all "where's mah stereo?"

The headphones may have RAM buffers for each channel, and only one of them is being loaded with actual data, and since they're expected to be loaded with data from the USB they're not zeroed-out before loading.
So it's reading random junk from its own memory then trying to interpret that as sound data.

So this glitch is the missingno of usb headphones?

More specifically, it's the one in Pokémon Yellow that has the stupidly long cry.

[dragdeler]

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[Arx]

Microsoft recently released Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition. I knew this was coming, and I have some... inside contacts, so I knew it was going to be bad. It's not a surprise that it's bad.

But I'm utterly baffled at the thought process behind the way it was developed and released. Literally all they had to do was make sure it ran smoothly without bugs. That's all. The design, planning, and so on all exist from the original version.

Instead, they've somehow stitched 3D rendering onto the shambling corpse of the Genie engine, made significant changes to the UI (pretty unambiguously for the worse), released it riddled with bugs, and dedicated a great deal of effort to hiding how bad things were pre-release.

I just don't understand. What were their priorities? What consumed all their dev time? Who was phone? If they weren't willing to delay release, how did they not see this happening when they set out the development roadmap? Why is the game still running on a single-threaded engine? Why is Microsoft allergic to making good decisions about AoE?

[Kagus]

Because if you release a version of the old game that's too good, then you'll draw buyers away from the new game you're going to be pushing out soon for a higher price.

By releasing a version of the old game that's bad, but is still a new and changed version to generate attention for the series, then there's nothing holding back buyers from getting the new game.


*bigthonk*

[Reelya]

That doesn't really hold in this case. There is no big RTS that Microsoft is going to be launching that would compete with a high-def version of Age of Empires 2. It's a re-vamp of AOE2 precisely because none of the sequels did any good. Note that the guy who was actually lead designer on the first AOE left and did the Empire Earth* series, so those are probably the legit sequels. AOE2 was good, but it pretty much kept to the formula of the first game, only streamlining elements.

*EDIT: Note that Empire Earth 1 was really good, but the expansion was ... horrible. Empire Earth: The Art of Conquest expansion was a publisher-made effort after the core team had moved on to making another game, and the expansion is frankly among the worst RTS campaigns I've ever played.

[dragdeler]

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[Arx]

That doesn't really hold in this case. There is no big RTS that Microsoft is going to be launching that would compete with a high-def version of Age of Empires 2.

AoE4 is coming out, actually. Still doesn't make sense - AoE2 fans are some of the most die-hard obsessives in the entire industry. They've been playing the old game for twenty years, it's going to take something intense to drag them away. DE was a chance to basically print money, and they have, so far, blown it.

Note that the guy who was actually lead designer on the first AOE left and did the Empire Earth series, so those are probably the legit sequels. AOE2 was good, but it pretty much kept to the formula of the first game, only streamlining elements.

Calling AoE2 a streamlined version of 1 really undersells the extent to which it improved on the same basic design, to be fair. It's like saying a modern car is a streamlined version of the Ford Model-T.

[ChairmanPoo]

And Empire Earth... ehh... nice graphics engine for its time, but I never found it to be too memorable.

[Akura]

I best remember Empire Earth for the massive pile of cheats the AI always used making solo vs AI skirmishes unbearable. Nothing like watching your army get yeeted by 20 nuclear bombers(one is about 10x expensive as a normal unit) launched from a single airfield(holds 7 max, I think), then an army pop out of a small patch of FoW that they could not have conceivably been placed in to finish off any survivors.

The second was slightly better in most regards, but unit balance was awkward among other issues. I only played a demo of the third, but it was... surreal. Like a bad reaction to salvia divinorum kind of surreal.