Dex Stewart
Level: Smiter
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Just a minor bug. For whatever reason, sometimes when I start the game, it has no sound at all. I checked settings, etc. A restart fixes it. Slightly interesting fact: both times it's happened so far was very shortly after I switched my monitor from portrait to landscape orientation. I do doubt this has anything to do with the problem though.

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[Last edited by Dex Stewart at 06-22-2014 02:13 PM]

mrimer
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This isn't a new bug. If DROD can't acquire sound resources, I'm not sure there's a way to "fix" that on start-up. Any ideas from developers?

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Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

skell
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Can you know from the code if the sound is not available, and can you try to reclaim it during runtime?

I can imagine it working in the way that it checks during the door/initialization sequence if it can access the sound driver and notify user if it can't. It could say something like "DROD has failed to acquire sound resources. You can try to reclaim them manually or restart the game and try again." with three buttons: "Play without sound", "Try again", "Quit".

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mrimer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

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Yes, it's a programmatic detection. We log it in drod.err. Having on-screen feedback would be nice.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

skell
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 3734
Registered: 12-28-2004
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@mrimer I assigned this to you since you're the most knowledgable about these nitty gritty technical details. My suggestion is to, in case DROD fails to access an audio output device to show a short message along the lines of:

"DROD has failed to access a sound device. It might be caused by another software claiming full ownership."

And two buttons: retry and ignore.

A better solution could be built from that (I'd love to have a way to select the output device used by DROD).

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mrimer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 5056
Registered: 02-04-2003
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I appreciate the neat ideas!

Moving this to the FR board.

Currently, the sound setup is inside InitSound() in Main.cpp (see the comment there).

We could, for instance, check once on the title screen if the sound has been disabled, and ask the user if they want to attempt reacquiring. Still, exiting the game via ESC and restarting is nearly as simple.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.