PrBoom+ Sound Issues

I know this has been posted before, but I haven't been able to find a thread where this was adequately solved, so let's try again (or you can direct me to such a thread).

This nice streamer person guy is trying to do a 24-hour Doom marathon, but after his laptop started overheating and Doom 3 BFG Edition was literally playing at like 70% speed for most of the stream, we begged him and finally convinced him to switch to prboom+.

Here's how that went: 

Pretty bad. It ran very smoothly for him, but the sound was pretty awful. I would really like him to be able to enjoy it, but due to the sound issues, that just isn't possible.

Problems:

• He doesn't know or care about his specs.
• He's been streaming for 15 hours at this point, so he's fairly tired and easily agitated.
• The streamer is pretty stubborn (in general) and refuses to try most fixes we suggested. It took almost 5 minutes for him to change to fullscreen.
  • This means we need a definitive solution, not something like "try turning off uncapped framerate" or something, because he won't do it.

Extra info:

• He's tried glboom+ and prboom+, with prboom+ being fullscreen and windowed.
• He didn't change any settings (except for the video mode and fullscreen settings). He used a starterpack I made, so you can see his exact config here:
  • https://www.dropbox.com/s/x3ik8431iwjazdc/prboom-plus-2.5.1.5-starterpack_v3.zip?dl=1
  • Running 2.5.1.5.
• It's possible that it has to do with him streaming, but if fixing this requires actually changing any streaming settings, he'll refuse that too.
• I've seen another streamer (who used my starterpack) experience the exact same issue, but he fixed it somehow, right then and there, so I have hope that this is easily resolvable.
• Sound seemed to be fine upon quitting the game, but that may have been a coincidence.

I just really want this person to experience the beauty of prboom+, so I hope it's something obvious and simple to fix. pls and thank you c:

edit:

"i think he's only streamed (doom) like once since i made this, and he most likely would have objected to any experimentation anyways

thank you for trying friends

ill use this thread for future reference and troubleshooting though

this is truly a sad day :("

:c

What is a starterpack?

14 minutes ago, Vorpal said:

What is a starterpack?

It's just what I called my little thingy that I linked. It's a preconfigured pr/glboom+ with .bat files and .txt file explaining everything.

edit:

1 minute ago, Vorpal said:

Im not gonna download it

...okay?

Im not gonna download it

did you try deleting all cfg files and running a vanilla installation? also try 2.5.1.4 & .5 to see if SDL2 made a difference

Have him try another source port that has a software midi library thingy, like GZDoom.

On 3/29/2018 at 3:39 AM, bonnie said:

He doesn't know or care about his specs.

It's likely specs related. It sounds like, judging by the midi note streaming stalling and audio just outright failing, that threads are being starved for resources and is unable to keep up, likely due to his streaming or something else.

A person who wants an easy answer isn't going to be easy to work with (which would make getting him to test without the streaming software running is out of the question), but the immediate answer would be to test 2.5.1.5 which uses SDL2, and see if that improves the audio situation.

Failing that, unless he's welling to pull finger, there's nothing you can do for him.

On 3/28/2018 at 11:24 AM, bonnie said:

It's just what I called my little thingy that I linked. It's a preconfigured pr/glboom+ with .bat files and .txt file explaining everything.

 

edit:

...okay?

Starterpack seems kinda cool and thought out. Was the laptop *still* hot when trying PrBoom+?

On 3/30/2018 at 11:49 PM, VGA said:

Have him try another source port that has a software midi library thingy, like GZDoom.

Yes. Or the reverse too :). We know that PrBoom+ sound does, in fact, work for lots of people, so the key is in a little bit of experimentation with the various settings to get an idea of what is really going wrong here.

On 3/31/2018 at 1:38 AM, Edward850 said:

It's likely specs related. It sounds like, judging by the midi note streaming stalling and audio just outright failing, that threads are being starved for resources and is unable to keep up, likely due to his streaming or something else.

A person who wants an easy answer isn't going to be easy to work with (which would make getting him to test without the streaming software running is out of the question), but the immediate answer would be to test 2.5.1.5 which uses SDL2, and see if that improves the audio situation.

Failing that, unless he's welling to pull finger, there's nothing you can do for him.

Agree. I can't say that I understand anyone refusing to try a little basic troubleshooting..., but @bonnie: Seems like it's up to you to figure out what's happening. Because you had experience setting up your 'starterpack', maybe you could set up a half-dozen starterpacks, each with different sound setups, and have him try each one, until one works.

If you have any luck, please post your findings.

i think he's only streamed (doom) like once since i made this, and he most likely would have objected to any experimentation anyways

thank you for trying friends

ill use this thread for future reference and troubleshooting though

this is truly a sad day :(

16 hours ago, kb1 said:

I can't say that I understand anyone refusing to try a little basic troubleshooting...

In my experience almost everybody refuses to do troubleshooting of any kind. They are too lazy and/or too scared that it's too complicated. That's one of the reasons why Steam is so successful – most people do not know how to install updates or even how to copy files without misusing the save as dialog of a word processor.

It's really frustrating.

To me, that's a lot of the fun: Tweaking the software to get it exactly the way you like, and to optimize performance, quality, or whatever. Troubleshooting falls into that same category, as far as I know.

Anyway, I tend to lose interest helping, when the person I'm trying to help "can't be bothered".

I had audio issues were the audio completely cuts off but gamplay still works and runs smoothly ,when I enabled the v1.1 pitch effect, when I disabled it the audio worked smoothly afterwards .

Suggestion: Disable v1.1 pitch effect

But it's off by default, why would he have it enabled? Unless it was enables in the prepackaged version he downloaded.

4 hours ago, CarboxylicAcids said:

I had audio issues were the audio completely cuts off but gamplay still works and runs smoothly ,when I enabled the v1.1 pitch effect, when I disabled it the audio worked smoothly afterwards .

 

Suggestion: Disable v1.1 pitch effect

Might be a winner:

Starter pack prboom_plus.cfg:

  pitched_sounds                1

Starter pack glboom_plus.cfg:

  pitched_sounds                1

@bonnie Sure would be nice if you could send updated versions of these 2 files to Nice Streamer Person Guy with this change:

  pitched_sounds                0

Could solve his issue, get a nice stream created, and answer a long term forum question all at once!

I actually like pitched sounds. It makes a group of Revenants sound less like a wall of noise. Also, what is considered the sweet spot regarding the number of sound channels used? 32 makes slaughtermap audio annoying while 8 has too much cutoff happening.

pitched sounds

16 channels

it is the best :)

I would find somebody else who actually gives a damn and wouldn't act like this streamer shown in your OP.

I agree. It's the responsibility of the streamer to be makes sure his stuff works, especially if he's making money off it.

3 hours ago, Glaice said:

I would find somebody else who actually gives a damn and wouldn't act like this streamer shown in your OP.

Well he was doing a 24-hour stream at the time, and I wanted it to be worthwhile (because he actually had a somewhat decent number of viewers [for a small channel]). It's too late now anyways, as I stated, since he seems to have stopped streaming (doom) altogether.

If he ever streams doom again, I'll tell him to try turning off pitched audio and see if that works I dunno ;~;

58 minutes ago, bonnie said:

Well he was doing a 24-hour stream at the time, and I wanted it to be worthwhile (because he actually had a somewhat decent number of viewers [for a small channel]). It's too late now anyways, as I stated, since he seems to have stopped streaming (doom) altogether.

 

If he ever streams doom again, I'll tell him to try turning off pitched audio and see if that works I dunno ;~;

The reason he is important (to DW) is that he has access to a computer known to have the sound problem! If it were me, I would ask for a few minutes of his time to diagnose this particular sound problem. It should be worth a few minutes of his time, because, in the end, he gets a working game that we know is a fun game...