[freespace2] a couple of questions

[Taylor Richards]

On Sun, 2004-05-09 at 16:03, Mihai Rusu wrote:
> 1. I have noticed debriefing texts do not show (well actually they do show 
> but only on some rare ocasions, usually when I get a medal or so); any 
> ideea where in the coides should I start digging about this ?

Hmm, that shouldn't happen.  You are using FS2 and not FS1 right?  Did
you compile it yourself or use one of ravage's installers?  Is this the
English version of the game or some other language?

FS1 does a little more to the debriefing screen than FS2 but I never saw
this problem during testing.  There shouldn't be any changes to the code
that would make this happen that I know of but some font or language
thing could possibly do this.

> 2. music and briefing voice dont work; this I think (after some digging in 
> the codes) its because it was intentionally stubed in audiostream_open; 
> any ideeas what should I need to code to get it working ? (theoretically 
> should be a lot easier than the 3d sound fx, this beeing plain sound playing)

There is a little more to it than plain sound since the music and
briefing voices have to be streamed.  The files would take up many
megabytes of RAM if they weren't.  I've worked on this code but have
never had time to finish it.  It will open files currently but the
buffer queuing parts are done yet.

3D sound is done but I don't really know the math/physics involved to
fix the position bug.  As soon as I can get that fixed the code will be
added to CVS.

> 3. I have noticed that while in game/playing mission if more than one 
> message comes (those messages allied ships and not only them send them and 
> displayed up) while the first one hasnt finishd they get played one over 
> eachover; on windows there is some kind of serialization, where should I 
> look in the codes for doing that ?

There should be nothing different here since the message playing code
has nothing in it that's platform specific.  Messages should be cut off
and only the newest one should get played.  If that's not happening then
it's a bug though I haven't seen it before.  You are using the full
retail version right?

> 4. (this might be because of the same problem as (3)) I noticed that when 
> some ship sends a message, the (white) box showing who sends the message 
> displays for a very short period of time (on windows I think it waits 
> until the voice message finishes)

There are some timing issues that have never really been explained.  The
voice messages are timed and the talking head HUD animation should last
as long as the voice message but it doesn't.  Some day this will be
figured out and hopefully fixed.  It's on my TODO list.

> 5. I would like to have my favourite game with my favourite distribution 
> (gentoo); so I will make a ebuild (a "package" file for gentoo) for 
> freespace2 but this means there is need to have checked out 
> snapshots/tarballs of the codes so they can be downloaded and compiled (I 
> dont think it works with ebuilds to download directly from CVS and even if 
> it would work it would be very unstable , can brake at any change in time, 
> so I need to have some code snapshots); now do you have such snapshots 
> available ? if not would it be ok if I make such CVS snapshots and put 
> them on my site ?

If you want to make a tarball of a CVS checkout and make that available
then I don't see anything wrong with that.  There isn't really a point
in making CVS snapshots since it's only myself and tigital (OSX port)
that are working on the game at the moment.  New movie code, 3D sound,
standalone server and streaming audio are the only missing parts and
I've started on all of them.  When it all works I'll update CVS but it
will probably be a couple of months before I get everything done.

I'm working more on the Linux version of FS2_Open right now and will
start bringing over some fixes, a large reduction in memory footprint
being the main thing, in the next couple of weeks.  Since I have to get
streaming audio and all of that working for FSO as well I'm writing so
that it's pretty much a drop in for icculus.org code.

Glad to see some more interest in the game!  If you have any more
questions or problems don't hesitate to ask.


Taylor

-- 
Taylor Richards <mtrs at bellsouth.net>