At 23:12 +0300 2001_06_26, Pekka Buttler wrote:
>Now the only thing I can come up with is that somewhere along the line Macr
>has F***'d up the internal pecking order of Director's tasks. IMHO, sound
>should come first, everything else later (as it is in video formats). The
>user can tolerate slow updating of the screen, but he can not tolerate sound
>cracking or breaking up.
>So now, fellow developers, I turn to you, hoping to receive any and all
>advice you can spare. Also If I just ain't seeing the forest due to all the
>trees, kick my butt and put me back on track.
First of all, rest assured that it's not you who f-worded up here.
Somebody else clearly made a b-word.
You are not the first nor only developer to experience the volatility
of D8 sound handling.
In fact I have been completely baffled, that the community as such
seemed to be able to make sound-dependant multimedia at all.
I have battled it, and had to go to extreme lengths to avoid sound-drop-outs.
And that was not QT related, qt3Mix was not used, since it was a
QT-less project.
Bruce Epstein has battled it too, and he came up with a set of
revision-numbers for dll and Xtras that had to be updated, but I
vaguely recollect, that his fix was only Mac related.
At any rate, the fix where you make a slim Projector, and patch in
all the latest D8.0 Xtras and system components, from a D8.0 SW
install, is clearly a first step to try, since it is by far the
easiest quickest fix, since it wouldn't require restructuring (maybe
apart from making a fast-Start-Projector, if you aren't already
[which, IMHO you should, and while I'm at it; don't fear FastSplash.])
The fix I used for a slide show engine, was to slice all images, and
load them asynchronously in Lingo, and with idleLoad. Then I
reconciled the images in an imageObjectBuffer, before copypixling the
lot to the stage.
The trick is clearly to identify any operation that occupies
Directors mind, for more than a split-second, and distribute that
cpu-load over time. This is mostly related to handling any bitmaps
larger than "small", but textMembers rendering to stage, also seems
to be able to break sounds.
I don't know what's causing this under the hood, but obviously I
guess at depleted sound-buffers.
Back in the D6.5 days I used the old MultiMixer Xtra to play all
sounds through QT. This Xtra has a fetaure where you explicitly
refreshes its buffers with a lingo call to the Xtra-instances.
What I did was to intersperse all heavy operations with a update-call
to my soundManager. Inside repeat loops and just before and after
loading of assets. The soundManager then refreshed the sounds when
necessary.
I have suggested that Lingo gets an equivalent feature, and a
Macromedia engineer said it sounded like a good idea.
Apparently this problem is somewhat recognized by Macromedia and
allegedly D8.5 contains sound fixes targeted at this particular
problem.
Recap to fix sound drop-outs:
1: Update Player components and Xtras with SW parts.
2: Slice images and load asynchronously
3: Use MultiMixer
4: Update to D8.5
Regards, Jakob
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