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Quasar

State of WinEternity

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Thought I should make myself a bit more visible around here after what went on in the CoD launch thread ;)

WinEternity is well on schedule for a release in the near future. The only thing remaining before we can release is sound. There are of course more reasons than I can count that are in the way of this launch happening sooner. One, I'm dead in the middle of the end of my semester in school. Finals are next week and I have little time for coding right now. Two, we haven't really identified a good GPL or LGPL licensed Windows sound library yet. We've looked at FMOD, but it has a restrictive license that rubs me the wrong way, and SDL_mixer, but it seems kind of lacking in professional quality.

If anyone has any recommendations or suggestions of libraries to avoid, please mention them here. Win32 Allegro is out of the question for obvious reasons. MIDAS has been suggested, but I don't know much about it yet -- how did it perform for you all when zdoom was using it? It seemed ok to me. Anyone know how its licensed?

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Zaldron said:

Isn't DirectSound enough?


Quasar said:

a good GPL or LGPL licensed Windows sound library

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I find absolutely nothing wrong with ZDoom's sound whenever I take the time to load it up. Sounds good enough to me.

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Suggest SDL - its very comprehensive and is definitely LGPL or GPL (can't remember which). EDGE uses SDL for sound under linux and works well on machines I've tried it. I suspect its good under Win32 as well.

BTW, whats wrong with allegro and (excuse the ignorance) what exactly are you trying to do?

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DarkknightXC said:

whats wrong with allegro

It's complete ass.

Not much else to say.

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DarkknightXC said:
BTW, whats wrong with allegro[/B]

Imagine perfectly good doom music. Okay. Now butcher it into suckness. Okay. That's allegro.

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Apparently I should have explained myself a bit more clearly on the zdoom thing -- zdoom now uses the FMOD library, but in the past, like with v1.18, it used the MIDAS sound library.

But I looked at MIDAS last night and its license is more or less identical to FMOD's -- you can use it for free as long as you're using it non-commercially, but if you want any amount of money (even $1) for your product, you have to pay them like $1000 up front and then 5% royalties on all sales.

I don't want to wed Eternity permanently to commercial software, even if it *is* legally possible under the GPL. Its a burden on my legacy I don't want to place.

So what I may do is eventually release multiple versions of WinEternity using different sound libraries, at least one of which is a free library (probably SDL_mixer). This won't be that much more work than writing one sound module I imagine, and prboom already has code to work off. And it avoids any permanent burdens on the engine.

SoM will hate this idea though, I'm sure ;)

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Submerge said:

Imagine perfectly good doom music. Okay. Now butcher it into suckness. Okay. That's allegro.


MIDI Music is very easy to fuck up and make sound bad. I remember the first implementation of music under DOSDoom and that was complete rubbish. The issue was a misread ptichwhell command. Once we re-hack it, the music was actually pretty solid.

What I find strange is why you don't feel that SDL would be a worth using (or you don't sound too keen IMO). Having actaully worked professionally as a games developer, i can tell you that SDL is actually pretty solid and well worth using.

Having said that, DirectSound isn't that bad an API (although microsith..., sorry microsoft have tried to make the docs ascomplex as ever).

BTW, Where is the Wineternity homepage?

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fodders said:

Allegro's are ok
my bro used to have one

My parent got one at auction in 1988, which used a ex-police car complete with zips for docs in the roof.

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fodders said:

Allegro's are ok my bro used to have one


IT NEEDS MORE POWER!!

OOGH OOGH OOGH!

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orion said:

he reminds me of a 60 year old Keanu Reeves.


*Evades bullets

Neo : Shit, uugh my back!

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fodders said:

Allegro's are ok my bro used to have one


Only after hours of being stuck behind Austin Allegros and their usually blue rinsed or flat capped drivers can you appreciate the full horror that is the Allegro.

A friend of mine owned one as was forever embarassed that he seemed to be the only Allegro driver under 75 years old. Mind you, he maintained that if you screwed your eyes up (a lot) they looked like a Porche 928 from behind, especially after the bumper fell off his one. He would always go on about the Rolls Royce-like front grille on the early vanden plas models too. :-/

The best thing about his Allegro, however, was the porno mag he found hidden under the front carpet by the previous owner. The previous owner was of course him Mum's priest. :-)

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Heheh, my bro's one had weird suspension, he had to keep taking it to the garage to have it pumped up or something :)

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I never said that *SDL* isn't of high quality -- indeed, the rest of everything in WinEternity is using it (video, input, etc). Rather, SDL's own sound functionalities are *very* low level. Frankly, I'm not a sound technician and I do not even know where I would begin, being required to write your own mixing functions to use SDL digital sound.

What I said didn't look very high-quality is the SDL_mixer add-on library. It kind of looks like, from an initial and perhaps misinformed opinion, like it was hacked together as an afterthought.

As for DirectSound, if I didn't want to use FMOD, which can be distributed for free, why would I use DirectSound, that can't be distributed period? Keep in mind that a Linux port should easily follow the Windows port since we've used SDL, and I do not want to have to rewrite everything an eighth time when that happens.

Plus, DirectSound isn't much more high-level than SDL. Its like writing sound code in assembly language 9_9

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Lüt said:

It's Tim Allen you numbnuts.


Looks more like Buzz Lightyear to me. :-)

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Quasar said:

I never said that *SDL* isn't of high quality -- indeed, the rest of everything in WinEternity is using it (video, input, etc). Rather, SDL's own sound functionalities are *very* low level. Frankly, I'm not a sound technician and I do not even know where I would begin, being required to write your own mixing functions to use SDL digital sound.


Apologies, I actaully thought you didn't want to use SDL because it was too high level. EDGE's SDL sound code (under linux, but it shouldn't take too much to hack it for Windozes) handles mixing OK.

Checkout:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/edge/edge/linux/is_sdl.c

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