From: Drew P. V. <dv...@in...> - 2000-09-12 21:55:31
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>The sound engine code has to be portable to many OS, am I right? >What music format will we be using? Wav, mp3? Raw wav is >lesser load on the CPU, and seems to be internally supported >in that SDL library...but takes up considerably more space than mp3! Well, this is my 6th attempt at writing this email, because this stupid shell I work from writes a message to my terminal when new mail arrives, destroying what's already on the terminal. Anyways, wave files are usually the best choice for a sound system in a game, as they are simple and clean to implement. However, they do occupy a considerable amount of space, which no Free software project wants, as most are distributed via the Internet. We should use a compressed form of wave files. Perhaps we could implement a sliding window compression algorithm to them. The inherent slowness of sliding window compression could be handled by decompressing the files to wave files in a temp directory, in a separate thread. The thread could decompress the first file, then the game could begin, with the decompression thread living in the background. This seems insane, at first thought. But I believe it could be done, as most systems have uptimes of multiple weeks, and multiple days at least. This means the wave files decompressed in the past could be left in the temp directory, to be found there the next time the client runs. Also, all the compressed sound files could be tar'd together, to create a simple client directory structure. --Drew Vogel (I am God. Really ... I have a book that says so.) |