Accelerated sound = missing effects

lawson · Post by **lawson** » Thu Aug 10, 2006 4:23 am

On two different PCs here, I'm getting the precise same issue. It appears both onboard audio chips are RealTek based, for what that's worth.

System A is a 1.4Ghz Athlon, ATI Radeon AIW 9800, Gigabyte 2004 RZ motherboard.

System B is an Athlon 64 X2 4400+, EVGA nVidia geForce 7900GT, Abit KN9 SLI

Symptom: In flight, afterburners and cockpit computer sounds don't work. Turning off sound acceleration in Allegiance enables the sounds sometimes. Adjusted DXDiag audio acceleration slider to little effect.

Both machines onboard audio are RealTek based.

Weird: If I fire the ABs during the launch animation, I hear the boosters UNTIL the camera pans into the cockpit (training mission 6). Could this indicate that the audio problem is positional, or has something to do with the 3D or surround features on this card?

I don't have speaker gear or time enough to test the surround sound theory yet. I use only a simple set of el cheapola speakers or a Koss headset.

Spunkmeyer · Post by **Spunkmeyer** » Fri Aug 11, 2006 1:02 pm

Exact same problem here. Realtek on board sound.

lawson · Post by **lawson** » Sat Aug 12, 2006 12:08 am

Spunkmeyer wrote:QUOTE (Spunkmeyer @ Aug 11 2006, 09:02 AM) Exact same problem here. Realtek on board sound.

I note there's a slight upgrade on the RealTek website. I've got 5.10.00.5247; there's a newer one (x.5283) at RealTek on the web. I'll give that a try.

Also: not sure if this applies to your motherboard, but apparently the RealTek onboards sometimes decide to get confused over which connectors to use. See http://www.pcmech.com/show/troubleshoot/743/ for info.

... later...

well, it seems to have helped just a bit. Testing again with full acceleration again...

lawson · Post by **lawson** » Sun Aug 13, 2006 7:00 pm

lawson wrote:QUOTE (lawson @ Aug 11 2006, 08:08 PM) I note there's a slight upgrade on the RealTek website. I've got 5.10.00.5247; there's a newer one (x.5283) at RealTek on the web. I'll give that a try.

Also: not sure if this applies to your motherboard, but apparently the RealTek onboards sometimes decide to get confused over which connectors to use. See http://www.pcmech.com/show/troubleshoot/743/ for info.

... later...

well, it seems to have helped just a bit. Testing again with full acceleration again...

... and it didn't fix it. Drat! It appears that any audio Allegiance puts out designated for "center channel" doesn't get mixed correct by the RealTek driver in "Headphone" mode (or several other modes I've tried, for that matter).

I tested with another older game, Deus Ex. Sure enuf, "center" channel sounds (voice narration, sounds from direct center as well) would mute nearly to zero.

I suspect there's a setting in the RealTek driver to fix this. I tried jumpering the front panel audio connector on the motherboard to emulate "front panel with nothing plugged in" (pins 9/10 and 5/6 jumpered, supposedly).

Next test: put this in a mode with a true center, and use these cheap $10 speakers I've got sitting around to connect everything up...

mdvalley · Post by **mdvalley** » Mon Aug 14, 2006 2:13 pm

I’m wondering, if you head into the control panel, under “Sounds and Audio Devices”, and click Advanced on the speaker settings, it shows what you really have hooked up, right? If it thinks you have 5.1 when you only have headphones or 2 speakers, you can get the muting problems. Set it to what you have.

lawson · Post by **lawson** » Tue Aug 15, 2006 10:42 pm

mdvalley wrote:QUOTE (mdvalley @ Aug 14 2006, 10:13 AM) I’m wondering, if you head into the control panel, under “Sounds and Audio Devices”, and click Advanced on the speaker settings, it shows what you really have hooked up, right? If it thinks you have 5.1 when you only have headphones or 2 speakers, you can get the muting problems. Set it to what you have.

I've tried pretty much every combination there, from Headphones (preferred) all the way to a 6-speaker fandango with a subwoofer.

The center channel keeps disappearing in Allegiance, even in "6-speaker with center" mode. Very strange...

Psychosis · Post by **Psychosis** » Wed Aug 16, 2006 6:28 am

when alot of sounds are accuring at the same time, the current sound engine simply cant deal with them, the FAZ dev team attempted to fix this, but created memory leakage for a number of players, making the upgrade unfeasilbe in its current state.

bottom line: your going to lost stuff sometimes.

Post by **Tigereye** » Fri Aug 18, 2006 7:03 am

Hmm.

While it's normal for certain sounds to drop out when many sounds are overlapping, it isn't normal for an entire channel to drop out and not return.

Allegiance generates the sounds in a 3D environment using DirectX calls, which get passed to your sound drivers according to the settings in Windows' Control Panel.

There's nothing in Allegiance that would cause the center channel to drop out, nor DirectX... so that leaves just your sound settings and drivers... or your speaker wiring itself.

Doublecheck to make sure your speakers are wired right (I once flipped the red/black wires /doh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":doh:" border="0" alt="doh.gif" />), and if you have a speaker test app, run it to see if you can hear sound from the center speaker.

Doublecheck your windows sound settings, but it sounds like you've already done that. Open the Control Panel again now anyways and look at the sound settings again just to be sure. Also, some soundcards install an app in your system tray that may not be 'coupled' with the windows control panel. If you have a sound icon in your systray that came with your soundcard, check its settings too.

Finally, if all that hasn't worked, grab new sounddrivers from your soundcard manufacturer's website.

Hope you fix it,

--TE

lawson · Post by **lawson** » Tue Aug 22, 2006 4:31 am

Tigereye wrote:QUOTE (Tigereye @ Aug 18 2006, 03:03 AM) Hmm.

While it's normal for certain sounds to drop out when many sounds are overlapping, it isn't normal for an entire channel to drop out and not return.

Allegiance generates the sounds in a 3D environment using DirectX calls, which get passed to your sound drivers according to the settings in Windows' Control Panel.

There's nothing in Allegiance that would cause the center channel to drop out, nor DirectX... so that leaves just your sound settings and drivers... or your speaker wiring itself.

There's the weird part. The sounds drop out, until I press F12 (11?) to switch to the outside view. Switch back to the cockpit view, and the sounds leave again. That seems to mean it's not "too many" sounds, but actually related to position.

I don't think it's Allegiance; I'm suspecting drivers too. In the game Deus Ex, the "center" channel is where the narration/character voices all go. They're nearly muted, but sometimes barely peep through. I wonder if there's some DirectX version issue, where some call is getting "forward-compatibled" into DX9, and DX9 tries to do something fancy and in the process loses something.

Well, time to dig up another soundcard. Since it's RealTek onboard doing this on TWO completely different CPU/chipsets, it's probably RealTek's to fix.

Any dev care to 'splain what the "accelerated sound" toggle really does down there at the DX function call level? Maybe there's some detail I could Google up.

mdvalley · Post by **mdvalley** » Tue Aug 22, 2006 2:53 pm

I’m pretty sure that your computer is convinced that you have a center speaker and is trying to play out of it. Does your sound card have more than one line-out? Try plugging a spare set of speakers into whatever outputs you have.

When hardware acceleration is on, the sound data is piped to the sound card, where the hardware does all the mixing. When acceleration is turned off in Alleg, the sound engine passes an additional flag to IDirectSound::CreateSoundBuffer (it’s called DBSCAPS_LOCSOFTWARE) that instructs it to mix the buffer in software. The CPU mixes the sounds and passes the finished mix to the sound card for playing.

DirectSound pulls your speaker configuration from the Control Panel, which is why I asked you to check. If that’s accurate, then I’d call it a driver/hardware issue.