Ambient Sound Problem - BFC, anything to do?

[Sergei]

I've had to resort to not using ambient sounds anymore because, for some mysterious reason, they cause a brief halt for the game every 5-6 seconds. This happens in both BB and BO. I don't remember having this problem in earlier years, so I don't really know what it could be connected with... but it'd be nice if I could play the ambient sounds.

There have been other mentions of this problem before, but I didn't find any answers in those threads.

I'll list some features of my system, maybe that helps:

CPU - 1 GHz AMD, Soltek motherboard

Memory - 128 Mb

Sound card - some Creative

Vid.card - Geforce 2 MX, Detonator 30.82

OS - WinXP

Car - Opel Ascona

Favourite colour - Red

[Schrullenhaft]

When was the last time you could play ambient sounds without the frequent halting you currently experience ? Are you using sound mods or the original sounds that came with the CDs ?

The ambient sounds are large files (10+ Mb) that loop in playback. The loops last longer than 5-6 seconds however.

Which Soltek motherboard do you have and have you installed the chipset drivers for in under WinXP ? Do you know which particular Creative sound card you have ? Have you installed updated drivers for it recently or at any point in the past while you've been running WinXP ?

I'd suggest getting some more memory since WinXP can be a bit of a memory hog and 128Mb is considered the minimum for that OS. Another 128Mb or 256Mb stick should be fine.

What other PCI cards do you have and do you know if anything is sharing an IRQ with your soundcard ?

[Sergei]

Thanks Schrullenhaft.

It's hard to tell when it started, as during the summer I had several changes in the config (CPU, motherboard & OS) and before that I had a 350 MHz processor in which you couldn't really pay attention to such little things... The hard drive is brand new as well. Dunno about chipset drivers, so probably no.

Actually I have 256 MB of RAM, got that wrong off my head.

The sound card seems to be Sound Blaster 64 PCI.

The pause seems to be caused by file access, but just reading the file shouldn't normally be a problem. I ran a test by having Media Player play the biggest ambient wave file on loop in the background while playing CM, and it ran smoothly. Then I hit shift+S to have the game play the ambient sound, and it started doing that trick again. :confused:

So it seems like having more to do with the way CM plays those files. Maybe something could still be done so that I can play ambient sounds normally in CMAK? I will gladly volunteer to test this if BFC wants to send me a beta version.

It would be good if others who have this problem (there probably are some, as others have asked this same question before but with no solutions) would come out so we could tell what we have in common.

[Schrullenhaft]

It may not help much (and this link may not work correctly), but you may want to try out these drivers for the SoundBlaster PCI 64. They're an update and they are dated Dec 19, 2002.

Interesting that the ambient sounds play fine when played in the background by another app.

If you had to guess, would you think the 'halting' started with an upgrade to the OS or to the motherboard (or were they simultaneous upgrades) ?

Which DirectX version do you have installed; 8.x is the default (and thus the minimum) for WinXP ? You could possibly run the 'DXDIAG' applet and on the 'Sound 1' tab reduce the 'Hardware Sound Acceleration Level' for your sound card to see if that would make a difference (some of the audio processing would be handed over to the CPU to perform).

[Sergei]

Installing that driver didn't help, although it did add some more volume control options! :cool:

The OS and hardware updates were simultaneous so I can't tell, really. There is even the chance that this has been around for longer than that, because on a 350 MHz system you can't tell one slowdown from another.

DirectX version is 9.0b.

Changing the DirectSound settings didn't alter the situation.