Beneath A Steel Sky Sound Stutter

Subforum for discussion and help with ScummVM's Nintendo DS port

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MatterEaterLad
Posts: 5
Joined: Sat Mar 31, 2007 7:57 pm

Beneath A Steel Sky Sound Stutter

Post by MatterEaterLad »

Whenever I move from room to room, the sound/music stutters for a second or two. That is, the sound/music plays the last, say, 0.5 secs over and over a few times before continuing. This also happens during the game intro.

I'm using 0.9.1a beta 3 (I also had beta 2) on M3 simply. I'm using the full CD version of BASS.

Thanks.
agentq
ScummVM Porter
Posts: 805
Joined: Wed Dec 21, 2005 4:29 pm
Location: London, UK

Post by agentq »

Yeah, this is a general problem for every game that ScummVM runs, and is because ScummVM uses something called blocking I/O. This means that when loading data off disk all other tasks will stop, including the sound buffer refill. With no new data to play, the sound buffer repeats the same data until it's buffer is filled again once the load has finished. Due to a general lack of memory, and the desire to keep a low latency time, the DS sound buffer is small and it doesn't have much data ahead of time.

This would happen on every platform that ScummVM runs, but on most other platforms, data loading is much quicker so it's a lot less noticable. If you run ScummVM DS on a CF card, the effect is a lot less noticable.
MatterEaterLad
Posts: 5
Joined: Sat Mar 31, 2007 7:57 pm

Post by MatterEaterLad »

Can you tell why this doesn't happen on Simon the Sorcerer (talkie)? Is it because each scene on Simon has less data to load?

On a related note regarding sound, there are a few spots in Simon where he's obviously talking but there's no sound. For example, at the beginning of the game when he is reading Calypso's note. The same problem does not occur on ScummVM windows.
agentq
ScummVM Porter
Posts: 805
Joined: Wed Dec 21, 2005 4:29 pm
Location: London, UK

Post by agentq »

Simon the Sorcerer does tend to load less data at one time, and it's possible the processing on this data takes less time too.

As for the missing audio, I would try this with the latest version of ScummVM DS. I thought I had fixed this a while back, and it's due to the speech sample not fitting into memory. It's possible that the memory usage has crept up a little though, or perhaps you're using a different version of Simon the Sorcerer which has higher memory usage.

In any case, it's odd that it's taken until now for someone to mention it if it's been there since beta3.

Edit: Forgot to mention that if you encode your Simon the Sorcerer audio as an MP3 using ScummVM tools, you will be able to play with all the audio intact!
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