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Re: Sound issues (installed openAL)

PostPosted: 29 Sep 2015, 16:32
by Exurok
Im on to something, i have 2 sound cards.

nr.1 - The onboard audio sound card realtek something shit.

nr.2 - The Sound blaster X-FI fatality champion

I turned nr.1 on
and
nr.2 off

Normally i have it the other way around with nr.1 onboard deactivated.

Then i tried remake again and this time i only had music. the SFX where completly gone.
This must mean that Remake is diverting the sfx and music differently.

to illustrate, remake might be having big trouble with 2 cards like this setup:

SFX = nr.2 - then after 10 sec deactivates cause other sound cards gets detected and remake is confused.
music = nr.2 - works ok. since nr.2 is primary driver.

If switched to nr.1 card

SFX = nr.1 - looking for nr.2 thats primary sound driver but deactivated, remake is confused. plays nothing.
music = nr.1 - redirects to nr.1 works ok.

(might even be worse for Sound blaster users)


So to conclude, is there a .ini or some file to tell remake to stay on card nr.2?

Re: Sound issues (installed openAL)

PostPosted: 29 Sep 2015, 16:48
by Exurok
Contacted Lewin, one of the lead programers of KAM Remake.
Lets see what he says.

Re: Sound issues (installed openAL)

PostPosted: 30 Sep 2015, 19:28
by Exurok
Update, it seems the less i do ingame the longer it takes for the SFX to fail...
Maybe this has something to do with a cache or something?

Say i start the game and only lobby idle, i can have sfx for a full minture!!
but if i rush into battle tutorial and spam units i lose sfx in less than 10 sec...

Re: Sound issues (installed openAL)

PostPosted: 01 Oct 2015, 05:59
by Lewin
Yes, the music and sound effects are completely separate in KaM Remake. It's a different library so it's not surprising that the music still works.

From what you have said the problem might occur after a certain number of sounds have played. For example the first 16 sounds work, after that it doesn't.

Can you please test whether the sound worked in older version of KaM Remake? You can download them here:
http://www.kamremake.com/download-archive/

Try the last two versions, r5503 and r4179. You can install them into separate folders and they shouldn't interfere with your current installation of KaM Remake.

That might give us a clue.

There could be an issue in the way we use OpenAL, or a bug in the OpenAL or sound card drivers.

Re: Sound issues (installed openAL)

PostPosted: 01 Oct 2015, 15:05
by Exurok
Yes, the music and sound effects are completely separate in KaM Remake. It's a different library so it's not surprising that the music still works.

From what you have said the problem might occur after a certain number of sounds have played. For example the first 16 sounds work, after that it doesn't.

Can you please test whether the sound worked in older version of KaM Remake? You can download them here:
http://www.kamremake.com/download-archive/

Try the last two versions, r5503 and r4179. You can install them into separate folders and they shouldn't interfere with your current installation of KaM Remake.

That might give us a clue.

There could be an issue in the way we use OpenAL, or a bug in the OpenAL or sound card drivers.
Thanks for replying so quickly Lewin.

Did as you asked and even more.
Tested all versions ever released:

2411
2678
2736
3392
4001
4179
5503

6720

Same result all of them, as you said. After 16 SFX files played sound dissappairs on all versions.
Please tell me i can up the limit to say 10000k so i can atleast play this wonderful mod with sfx.

Thank again Lewin, big honor to have you here. :mrgreen:

Re: Sound issues (installed openAL)

PostPosted: 07 Oct 2015, 22:32
by Mangoara
Yeah soo I've switched to the onboard Realtek audio card for now which luckily also supports 5.1 surround sound (don't like it but Windows 10 seems to dislike the latest Creative drivers anyway). And that works fine.. so for now I'm just going with this. Hope I can switch back to my Creative sound card soon with either an update from Creative, Microsoft or a new KAM remake build :)

Re: Sound issues (installed openAL)

PostPosted: 08 Oct 2015, 16:14
by Exurok
Yeah soo I've switched to the onboard Realtek audio card for now which luckily also supports 5.1 surround sound (don't like it but Windows 10 seems to dislike the latest Creative drivers anyway). And that works fine.. so for now I'm just going with this. Hope I can switch back to my Creative sound card soon with either an update from Creative, Microsoft or a new KAM remake build :)

Yeah this confirmation is a good lead.
It must be something with the teory i posted earlier about what soundcard KAM remake chooses and uses..

Re: Sound issues (installed openAL)

PostPosted: 11 Oct 2015, 11:46
by Exurok
Progress 11.10.2015

Muting KAM with windows sound mixer mutes only music not SFX.
This might also confirm the use of 2 different audio sources being bugged in kam remake for users with 2 sound cards.

Re: Sound issues (installed openAL)

PostPosted: 11 Oct 2015, 15:51
by Exurok

12 November 2011 00:06:36

^^ I know EXACTLY what you mean, but very, very few programs allow you to assign audio to the non-default sound output device. That being said, it *should* be possible to do what you want, as most music playback software allows you to set which audio output device to use. For example, you can configure Windows Media Player to always output to whatever sound device your headphones are hooked up to.

Re: Sound issues (installed openAL)

PostPosted: 16 Oct 2015, 16:02
by Exurok
Any progress here? Some players are still without sfx.

Re: Sound issues (installed openAL)

PostPosted: 19 Oct 2015, 00:57
by Lewin
16 is the maximum number of simultaneous sounds KaM Remake plays. So maybe your problem is that once an OpenAL source/buffer is used, it will never be reused. Which sounds like a bug in OpenAL or your sound driver...

I'll send you a PM with a testing version of KaM Remake that has extra debugging. Anyone else who is having sound problems and wants to help test it just ask.

Extract the ZIP to your KaM Remake r6720 folder and then run KaM_Remake_Sound_Test.exe. Start a game and play it for a few minutes. Take note of the "number of sounds playing" text over the game area. Exit the game then send me the newest file in your Logs folder.

Re: Sound issues (installed openAL)

PostPosted: 19 Oct 2015, 15:37
by Exurok
Extract the ZIP to your KaM Remake r6720 folder and then run KaM_Remake_Sound_Test.exe. Start a game and play it for a few minutes. Take note of the "number of sounds playing" text over the game area. Exit the game then send me the newest file in your Logs folder.
Alright, its done, sendt you the log on pm.
The total number of sounds that was playing was 0-2.

Re: Sound issues (installed openAL)

PostPosted: 25 Oct 2015, 23:03
by bimdo
The problem of exurok is a problem of creative drivers with xfi and openal. This problem arrives since 2.40.008 driver (win7) and above (2.40.010 and 0.12 in windows10).
This problem exists since one year and above. Creative don't care but if developers of KM speak to creative about this bug, maybe the problem will be solved. Creative has the worst driver support in the world.

lots of topic speak about this bug
http://www.oldunreal.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/ ... 1400445026
http://forums.creative.com/showthread.p ... post603401
http://forums.creative.com/showthread.php?t=708255
https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread ... 7fde139267
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/3 ... ved#latest

A workaround is to use 2.17.008 driver if you have win7 (no luck if you have windows10) or to use openalsoft but the bug stay in creative drivers.

Re: Sound issues (installed openAL)

PostPosted: 25 Oct 2015, 23:30
by Lewin
The problem of exurok is a problem of creative drivers with xfi and openal. This problem arrives since 2.40.008 driver (win7) and above (2.40.010 and 0.12 in windows10).
This problem exists since one year and above. Creative don't care but if developers of KM speak to creative about this bug, maybe the problem will be solved. Creative has the worst driver support in the world.

lots of topic speak about this bug
http://www.oldunreal.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/ ... 1400445026
http://forums.creative.com/showthread.p ... post603401
http://forums.creative.com/showthread.php?t=708255
https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread ... 7fde139267
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/3 ... ved#latest

A workaround is to use 2.17.008 driver if you have win7 (no luck if you have windows10) or to use openalsoft but the bug stay in creative drivers.
Thanks for the information, that is indeed the same problem that is happening here. This is what I wrote to Exurok in a PM when he sent me the log files:
The problem is that on your system the sounds don't stop playing when they finish. They are still in the "playing" state so we never reuse the OpenAL source. On every other system I've seen when the sound reaches the end it goes to the "stopped" state.
I'm not sure if us emailing Creative is going to help, I'm sure a lot of other people have tried that already.

So for now the work around is to install OpenAL Soft. Exurok can you please try that?
Website: http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html
Current version: http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal-soft-1.16.0-bin.zip

Inside the ZIP file under bin/Win32 you will find soft_oal.dll. Copy that to your KaM Remake folder and rename it to OpenAL32.dll

Then start the game and it should use the software OpenAL library, rather than the hardware accelerated one which is broken due to Creative's drivers.

Re: Sound issues (installed openAL)

PostPosted: 26 Oct 2015, 05:57
by Exurok
THIS WORKED!

Image

Thank you so much for your time and dedication! Donation coming right up! :mrgreen:

- As a note, i do not use creatives drivers. I use PAX creative drivers.
He makes better drivers then creative itself and much much more stable.
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/community ... eries.181/