Game Development: Seaworthy Movement

[SnuggleSnail]

• Added a "Seaworthiness" meter, active while on Ships (Knarrs & Snekkjas), displaying how much damage the vessel has currently taken. We debated adding it to rafts, dugouts, and rowboats, but decided against it since it would be useless info most of the time, but feel free to opine otherwise.

Because of how unobtrusive it is, I would personally prefer it to be active for rowboats/dugouts/rafts just for whirlpools

[loftar]

just for whirlpools

That's a good argument, I guess.

[loftar]

What about setting the audiobuf to something more reasonable by default so that people can hear the sound a few milliseconds later in exchange for not having to hear stuttering bullshit every time they load up the game :ugeek:

The basic problem is that a larger value isn't really very sensible, as it makes the latency too high in my opinion. On the other hand, there's also the problem that neither Jorb nor I have any audiobuf problems, so I do tend to forget that it's even a thing, and in that context, just setting the audiobuf unreasonably high by default could perhaps at least serve to remind me to debug the problem more often. (There's also the issue that I can't really debug it productively since I can't reproduce it, though.)

If only for the record, what are the audiobuf values that you guys need for your audio to work properly? Is 2048 enough, or does it have to go all the way to 4096? Mine tends to work all the way down to 128. Preferably, for frame-synced audio at 60 FPS, it should be below 750.

[shubla]

What about setting the audiobuf to something more reasonable by default so that people can hear the sound a few milliseconds later in exchange for not having to hear stuttering bullshit every time they load up the game

The basic problem is that a larger value isn't really very sensible, as it makes the latency too high in my opinion. On the other hand, there's also the problem that neither Jorb nor I have any audiobuf problems, so I do tend to forget that it's even a thing, and in that context, just setting the audiobuf unreasonably high by default could perhaps at least serve to remind me to debug the problem more often. (There's also the issue that I can't really debug it productively since I can't reproduce it, though.)

If only for the record, what are the audiobuf values that you guys need for your audio to work properly? Is 2048 enough, or does it have to go all the way to 4096? Mine tends to work all the way down to 128. Preferably, for frame-synced audio at 60 FPS, it should be below 750.

8192 is the commonly used value among those who use the command.

[Apocoreo]

I'm generally a fan of sensible defaults.

I... I don't think that's true, the sensible part. Item quality is still not the default, does anyone play with it off?

Especially in a game as esoteric as this, wouldn't it reduce complaints and distraction from dev time to aim for a modular design? Meaning more options and toggles, preferably in one location as we got an options menu and that toggles menu. Think about how many people ask how to turn item q on.

[valeriesusanne]

loftar wrote:
I'm generally a fan of sensible defaults.


I... I don't think that's true, the sensible part. Item quality is still not the default, does anyone play with it off?


I... I totally agree with Apocoreo

[TheRussianB]

What about setting the audiobuf to something more reasonable by default so that people can hear the sound a few milliseconds later in exchange for not having to hear stuttering bullshit every time they load up the game

The basic problem is that a larger value isn't really very sensible, as it makes the latency too high in my opinion. On the other hand, there's also the problem that neither Jorb nor I have any audiobuf problems, so I do tend to forget that it's even a thing, and in that context, just setting the audiobuf unreasonably high by default could perhaps at least serve to remind me to debug the problem more often. (There's also the issue that I can't really debug it productively since I can't reproduce it, though.)

If only for the record, what are the audiobuf values that you guys need for your audio to work properly? Is 2048 enough, or does it have to go all the way to 4096? Mine tends to work all the way down to 128. Preferably, for frame-synced audio at 60 FPS, it should be below 750.

Stuttering gradually decreases for me as I increase it up to 8192.

[shubla]

for frame-synced audio at 60 FPS, it should be below 750.

Frame synced audio sounds cool but in fact, people can only tell the difference in delayed audio on videos with speech for example only after 100ms or so.

So perhaps the default buffer should be increased for all to prevent these audiobuf issues as many have them? Perhaps it could be dynamically scaled?

[Ciego]

If only for the record, what are the audiobuf values that you guys need for your audio to work properly? Is 2048 enough, or does it have to go all the way to 4096? Mine tends to work all the way down to 128. Preferably, for frame-synced audio at 60 FPS, it should be below 750.

For a year and a half, I successfully used audiobuf 3072, up until this last summer. Then the game changed and I found the stuttering more noticeable. So I moved it to 4096. This seems the best balance between performance of game, vs performance of audio, on MY COMPUTER.

[loftar]

Frame synced audio sounds cool but in fact, people can only tell the difference in delayed audio on videos with speech for example only after 100ms or so.

Well, the problem isn't just the absolute amount of latency, it is more that new sounds can only begin playing at the boundaries between audio buffers, so as several frames are covered by one buffer timespan, any sound triggered by any of those frames is forced to start playing at one instance. As such, it not only increases the absolute latency, but also the "jitter", which is arguably the greater problem.