Sergei Posted December 8, 2003 Share Posted December 8, 2003 I have this same problem on BO and BB, so please read this Tech Support thread: The issue on CMBB 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.Interestingly, in CMAK demo the ambient sound worked just fine. This would definately suggest that the reason is in the size of the ambient sound files being played. But why then the problem doesn't show up when I am playing the same ambient sound files in Windows Media Player on the background??? :confused: Please step forth if you have this same problem! [ May 19, 2004, 01:22 PM: Message edited by: Sergei ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madmatt Posted December 9, 2003 Share Posted December 9, 2003 The halt is most likely due to your sound card or more directly your sound drivers. You should see about updating your sound drives. The ambient sounds are all about 10 megs in size though so as the game accesses them you might be encountering a slight delay due to a slow harddrive or slow memory or any number of other performance hampering issues with your computer. You might want to try and adjust your level of sound acceleration via the DirectX control panel, one notch to the left. As to playing the sounds back out of the game, use WinAmp, it has no problems with any of the sounds. Madmatt [ December 08, 2003, 05:07 PM: Message edited by: Madmatt ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sergei Posted December 9, 2003 Author Share Posted December 9, 2003 Thanks Matt for commenting. But you see, the drivers and DirectX have already been tried (see the earlier thread I linked). The size of the files would seem likely reason based on the lack of problems with the demo (which uses lower quality sounds). But if that or my sound card driver was the only reason, then how come there are no delays when I play the exact same files in the background? This I don't understand. It would make more sense that the delays would occur also when played in the background. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sergei Posted December 9, 2003 Author Share Posted December 9, 2003 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madmatt Posted December 11, 2003 Share Posted December 11, 2003 What do you mean "in the background"? Do you mean outside the game? There is not a similar delay because there is not a several hundred meg application running at the same time taxing your system overhead. For whatever reason you system seems to have trouble playing the ambient samples. If you have access to a decent sound editing package you might want to try and convert the backgrounds from stereo to mono. That will reduce their size by half which might do the trick, but they wont sound the same. Other than that, not sure what else for you to check. Madmatt 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted December 12, 2003 Share Posted December 12, 2003 Madmatt, I assume he's playing the ambient sounds in a loop with WinAmp in the background while CM plays without ambient audio in the foreground. It sounds strange to me too. I'd guess that ACPI and sharing an IRQ among several PCI devices may be the culprit and maybe the OS handles the device/resource contention a bit better than a monolithic application could (or the audio driver cooperates a bit better with the OS's control of it) . But I have no real idea why this is happening. The only thing I could suggest is to get a newer sound card. The CMedia 8738 cards are inexpensive and fairly compatible. The Creative SoundBlaster Live's are down to US$29.00, but there can be problems with those cards too. A Turtle Beach Santa Cruz OEM card would be a good one too. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sergei Posted December 12, 2003 Author Share Posted December 12, 2003 Schrullenschaft's assumption is a correct one, I meant running the player and the game parallel (just like you can play MP3's in the background). Sorry if I didn't make it clear. The way this slowdown happens is mysterious as well. If I for instance play MP3's in the background and have a big battle in CM going on, the refresh rate drops and the playback of MP3 suffers a bit. But my case with CM ambient sound is not like that: it seems like every ~5 seconds the whole system stops to load a new bit of the ambient sound file (the hard drive led flashes at the same time), and for a less than a second duration there is no movement. I'll try testing it with a friend's soundcard, but he won't be here before Christmas (no, his name is not Nicholas). 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sergei Posted December 12, 2003 Author Share Posted December 12, 2003 Oh, and should it help anything, I'll remind you that ambient sound USED TO work on this sound card (SB 64 PCI) in CM. I think the change happened when I swapped from WinME to WinXP. Doesn't mean that the fault is in XP itself though, some settings could have changed. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted December 12, 2003 Share Posted December 12, 2003 Most likely the change was ACPI, which is supported in WinME, but maybe something changed. WinXP has a clear preference for ACPI and its method of shoving all PCI devices onto one IRQ. ACPI is actually a setting in the BIOS and WinXP will use it if it is turned on (a number of motherboards don't allow for turning it off). Anyway, with all PCI devices on one IRQ there's only one 'party line' for the devices to request attention from the CPU. Some device drivers may not operate very well with the ACPI protocol. Interestingly in your case there seems to be disk accesses when playing CM with ambient audio. However I assume that there are no such disk accesses when using WinAmp to play the ambient audio in the background. It seems as if WinAmp is caching the entire WAV file in memory, while CM is resorting to reading from the disk. What's strange about this though is that after playing the ambient sound once, you would assume that it would remain in memory since it is constantly being called up. Is there anything different (in terms of running programs) between when you play the ambient audio on WinAmp and when you play it from CM itself (other than WinAmp being loaded up in the background) ? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sergei Posted May 19, 2004 Author Share Posted May 19, 2004 Update: The mysterious problem is now corrected. This week I had a very alarming situation with my computer, as things were loading very slowly - I feared my hard drive was blowing up or something. Scandisk didn't notice anything, though. Then I checked my memory. 64 MB was missing! I swapped places between two memory sticks, and things returned to normalcy. Except that I just for kicks tried turning ambient sounds on in Combat Mission, and all of the sudden the long-suffered problem wasn't there anymore! Hurrah! I upgraded my computer last summer and at the same time switched to XP. It never crossed my mind that this would have had something to do with my system memory blocks having contact problems or anything! Thanks for the attempts by Schrull and all to help me, hopefully this knowledge may help someone else some day. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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