Cosmic Birdie Tech Demo Audio Test

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#1

Hi all!
Thanks to everyone who gave the first release a good working on the other thread. I set this one up on the side because we are having a crazy audio bug and maybe with enough testing feedback we can help the Sun team crack this.

I am going to paste in an email about this here, the main thing I am looking for help on is if you hear sound or not on your machine, from the TWO different launch links, one is JOAL the other is LWJGL.

Once you launch the app, in 5 secs you shoudl hear some noise. Once the game window is up just close it, and the following window. You could play :slight_smile: but the test is really over at that point. Please post your results and machine config!

Thanks and here is the email:

Ok I have two .jnlp links up that show the JOAL/web start/Java3d(?) issue.
I set it up as a command-line swtich so one .jnlp launches the app switching to JOAL, the other switches to LWJGL.

One some machines both work fine, but on the other set, the JOAL web start fails to make sound. What should happen is 5 seconds after launch you should hear some noise.

There is allot of output that gets dumped through the start up process since this is the full game app, but the output at the very beginning is useful as it will say which version is running and on the JOAL version it outputs an error when the sound is initialization.

It has the 5 sec pause before and after sound initialization, all I did to put LWJGL in was change the appropriate API calls in our soundmanager (and cut out everything else from the app), and switch some stuff to nio.buffers since that is what all the LWJGL calls take. Basically I pulled up a simple tutorial for reference, changed what I could and replaced what I had to.

I hope you find a machine that shows this failure so you can at least reproduce this.

Here’s the links:
http://www.imilabs.com/CosmicBirdie/Dist/cbWeb2-JOAL.jnlp

http://www.imilabs.com/CosmicBirdie/Dist/cbWeb2-LWJGL.jnlp

#2

JOAL fails
LWJGL works

Shuttle X, AMD Athlon XP 2500+ 1.84Ghz, nVidia nForce Audio, WinXP SP2, nVidia 6800, 1G RAM

#3

Same results here …

AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (2.1 GHz)
512MB System RAM
Windows 2000 Professional
Nvidia GeForce4 MX 420 64MB 3D Acceleration
Nvdia Audio

#4

Both work here:

Mustang B82, XP SP2, AMD Athalon64 X2 3200+, 2Gb ram, Nvidia 7900GT and an nvidia board…

(white noise right ?)

DP

#5

Both fail to launch on Linux, can’t download some files for JOAL…

#6

Same results:
Win XP, SP2, SoundMax integrated thingy

#7

[quote="<MagicSpark.org [ BlueSky ]>,post:5,topic:28020"]
Both fail to launch on Linux, can’t download some files for JOAL…
[/quote]
Sorry! Windows ONLY right now :slight_smile:

And awesome help guys!
keep 'um coming :wink: tell your friends hehe.

#8

Sorry! Windows ONLY right now :slight_smile:
[/quote]
Aaargh. :wink: Yet beware : many (small) companies announce Linux/Mac support, then test on Windows only, then 3 months later realize it’s too much hassle to then have Linux and Mac compatibility and drop it. >:(
Hopefully it won’t be the same with you.

#9

[quote="<MagicSpark.org [ BlueSky ]>,post:8,topic:28020"]

Sorry! Windows ONLY right now :slight_smile:
[/quote]
Aaargh. :wink: Yet beware : many (small) companies announce Linux/Mac support, then test on Windows only, then 3 months later realize it’s too much hassle to then have Linux and Mac compatibility and drop it. >:(
Hopefully it won’t be the same with you.
[/quote]
Actually, that is a non-issue because all the libs we use are already out on Mac and Linux.
It’s just that this web start launch only does Windows because

  1. to isolate this bug and
  2. Java3D 1.4.1 is not out on Mac and so I would have to run Java3D 1.5 (beta) and well it’s really beta, - crashes in our app - not exactly good to show when you’re doing widespread testing. I know J3D 1.5 crashes, it’s beta. I wanted a bit more stability for these tests.
#10

JOAL fails
LWJGL works

w2k
nforce audio via a Realtek ALC650 chip

#11

Both the JOAL and LWJGL versions work on my two home machines. One is a notebook (Dell Precision M60), Windows XP SP1; the other a desktop (Dell XPS 400), Windows XP SP2. I’ll try it on more machines at work tomorrow to see if we can reproduce the JOAL failure in-house.

#12

The LWJGL version works on my home machine. When I run the JOAL version I get a Windows popup dialog with an error message stating that OpenAL32.dll cannot be found. Is it possible that a similar, but silent, failure to load OpenAL is causing the problems on the other systems that are failing?

– Kevin

P.S. I tried it on a second home machine with the same result.

#13

Possible, I made the native JOAL jar for web-start and put it in there once because Jake2’s web start joal.jars had it although it I never found that I needed it so I yanked it, I put it in there because Jake2’s web start joal.jars.

I also made the LWJGL native jar and it DOES have the openAL32.dll in it.

Hmm so this test should be rerun I guess. I’ll repack the JOAL native jar right now with the same OpenAL32.dll and see if it changes anything. IIRC it didn’t, but still should be put int for the test ot be close as possible.

I guess the other thing to note about this is that it’s still whacky because it fails seemingly on random machines, but consistently on those machines.

[mod]
Ok I fixed the JOAL.jnlp to use the joal-native.jar that had the OpenAL32.dll packed in it.
No change for me still fails.

#14

Could be on those random machines where it works OpenAL.dll is already in the standard search path.

Kev

#15

Seems logical right, but other JOAL demo (Jake2) works at least on my machine. And at least my team went through and tried several driver changes, openAL installs etc.
And the original test app that showed a threading issue worked once the thread part was fixed.
However, in the actual game app even with the thread set up right, it still fails on SOME machines, but does not fail with LWJGL…

#16

Are there multiple versions of OpenAL32.dll? Is it possible that an incompatible version is being picked up somehow on the machines on which it fails?

#17

We have been using this installed into our machines, which is the latest…
http://developer.creative.com/articles/article.asp?cat=1&sbcat=31&top=38&aid=46

So yes there could be different versions, but then why would one web start app running JOAL work and another running JOAL not, which is what is happening. Maybe I should post the link again side by side.

Works (JOAL)
http://www.imilabs.com/CosmicBirdie/Dist/soundTest.jnlp

Fails (JOAL)
http://www.imilabs.com/CosmicBirdie/Dist/cbWeb2-JOAL.jnlp

Works (LWJGL)
http://www.imilabs.com/CosmicBirdie/Dist/cbWeb2-LWJGL.jnlp

BTW, by works I mean you hear sound shortly after start-up. I will stop once the graphics get going, that is correct behavior.

#18

OK!!!
I made some progress with the suggestions that just came up.

You can try this too.
I UNINSTALLED OpenAL (add and remove programs)
Then when I run the demos above it get.
Demo 1 (JOAL) runs fine.
Demo 2 (JOAL) BLOWS UP with a dialog box! Finally something interesting.
Demo 3 (LWJGL) runs fine.

See grab for dialog box.

#19

Interesting. On my home machine, the first JOAL test runs and produces sound, but the second gives the OpenAL32.dll library not found error. So something is different about the two tests.

– Kevin

#20

Yep. That’s the behavior I get.

– Kevin