Beta 4d: stable game play,camera steady, but sound distorted

[fletchbiz]

Just wanted to report that Beta 4d does indeed provide a major step forward in playability. No camera shake, reasonable frame rate (ranging from 10 to 30-50). Gestures work reliably.

The only thing I'm noticing is sound problems. When first starting the game, the sound is extremely distorted, with skips and lots of clipping. Things settle down a bit after a few minutes, but even so, there are times when I noticed distortion problems throughout. These incidents were mostly high-pitched squeeks. They did not sound like anything coming from the game itself, although, with all the blips and blorps the game makes, I suppose it could be. The squeeks I heard were just too raspy and out of character to have been intentional.

One other thing I noticed was that adjusting the screen prefs downward caused a negative effect on frame rate. For example, taking bit depth to 16 slowed everything down. Bit depth at 32 was best. Taking resolution down to 640 X 480 made game quite ugly, but it did not speed up frame rate. Therefore, I found the max resolution at 32 bit depth to be the most playable setup on my iMac G4 1 gHz/768 MB.

Outside of that, the latest beta is great. No crashes on start up or quit. Just good play. In fact, my 11-year-old daughter spent 90 minutes having a very fine time completing all the objectives and ended wanting more.

Fletch

[John]

Thanks Fletch. Please could you try editing

~/Library/Application Support/Darwinia/demo/preferences.txt

Set the SoundBufferSize to 1024 or 512. Does this improve matters? For me it stopped the skipping at the beginning. What about the sound distortions?

[xander]

Changing the settings as you describe does have a noticable effect on sound quality, but it does not entirely fix the problem.

This is what it sounds like with default settings: Sound 1
This is what it sounds like with with SoundBufferSize set to 1024: Sound 2

Both files are .aifc, which is all I can record at the moment. I am pretty sure that you should be able to play it with iTunes, and the Finder has no problem with it.

Hope that helps,
xander

[John]

Thanks Xander, is it roughly the same with 512?

[xander]

Thanks Xander, is it roughly the same with 512?

/me starts up a text editor and Darwinia...

[several moments later]

Better than default, not as good as 1024... this is what it sounds like.

xander