Commit Graph
4 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
CydandClaude Opus 5 523f713a30 Volume and bass knobs, for players without an amplifier
The cabinets ran the game at unity and shaped volume and tone outside it,
in an external amplifier and a 3-way crossover. That is why there is no
master volume anywhere in the original code and none in AUDIO.INI - an
operator turned a knob on an amp. A desktop player has no amp and no
crossover, and the recovered soundbanks are a good deal livelier than what
4.12 shipped with, so the game has to offer the two controls the pod got
from hardware.

RP412AUDIOVOLUME, 0.0 to 4.0, is the amplifier: a listener gain, which the
port had never set at all. RP412AUDIOBASS, 0.0 to 1.0, is the crossover's
low band. Both default to leaving the mix exactly as the pod played it, so
neither changes anything for anyone who does not go looking.

The bass trim is not a filter, and the reason is worth writing down: the
OpenAL we ship is Creative's, not OpenAL Soft, and it implements only
AL_FILTER_LOWPASS. It rejects highpass and bandpass outright. A bandpass
would have been the tidy answer, carrying the authored brightness model on
GAINHF and the trim on GAINLF across the single direct filter a source
gets. It is not on offer.

So the trim scales sample data as it loads, which suits how this low end is
actually built: the weight lives in discrete deep layer zones whose per-zone
tuning bakes out to a very low playback rate - thirteen zones below 8kHz,
three to five octaves under their recorded pitch, against four fifths of the
set at 22kHz and up. Baked rate is a dependable proxy for band, so pulling
down the low-rate zones is a real low-band trim and not a blunt cut. It eases
in below 22kHz and reaches full depth at 5.5kHz.

Caught while building this, and the reason for the probe: EFX_Initialize
checks alGetError after configuring the scratch filter, so asking for a
filter type the driver refuses leaves an error pending and takes the entire
bridge down - reverb included. The bandpass attempt did precisely that and
would have silently killed the reverb and brightness work. Initialize now
survives losing the filter and says so.

Builds clean, runs with both knobs set and with neither.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-05 23:45:29 -05:00
CydandClaude Opus 5 e133d4c993 Sounds recycle their voices instead of churning through them
Recovering the soundbanks took voice demand per sound from about one zone to
about two and a half, and the audio path allocated an OpenAL source for every
sound event and destroyed it again on release. Sources are a hard
per-context resource - this driver grants 256 - so that churn doubled at
exactly the moment it got more expensive. Sources are now generated once and
recycled through a free list: measured, three sources generated across
twelve thousand acquisitions.

The BT tree reached the same conclusion the expensive way, from field logs
full of failed acquisitions: raising the source budget is not the fix,
because the ceiling also acts as a governor and more voices mixing is real
CPU during exactly the busiest moments. Recycling is the fix, and it costs
nothing.

Two older bugs were sitting underneath, both reproduced against the driver
rather than assumed:

Releasing a set leaked it. alDeleteSources is atomic - one bad name in the
array and nothing at all is deleted. ReleaseSourceSet handed it the whole
fixed-size array and then parked the slots at -1, so any partial set, and
any double release, leaked every source it held. Sources are now handed back
one at a time and slots park at 0, which is never a valid name.

A source set began life uninitialised. The constructor set only the count,
and the acquire path decided whether a slot was already filled by asking
OpenAL about uninitialised stack garbage. Garbage that happened to match a
live name meant two sounds silently sharing one source. Pooling would have
made that more likely, not less, since it keeps small names in circulation.

Recycled sources are scrubbed before parking - stopped, buffer detached,
looping, gain, pitch, relative flag, position and velocity reset, and the
EFX filter and reverb send dropped. Without that last part a dry cockpit
sound inherits the wet send of whatever 3D source held the name before it.
Verified: a deliberately dirtied source comes back clean.

Builds clean. Runs with memory and handle count flat.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-05 23:33:45 -05:00
CydandClaude Opus 5 d361a0b8be The sound effects play at the pitch they were written at
Red Planet's original AWE32 soundbanks are back in the tree, and the game's
sound effects are now generated from them instead of from an incomplete
one-off extraction.

AUDIO1.RES and AUDIO2.RES come from the 1996 release in the TeslaRel410
archive, hash-identical. AUDIO.INI has named them all along - they were
simply never carried into the port. tools/rp_sf2extract.py reads them and
regenerates both the WAV set and RP_L4/WTPresets.cpp, so the assets are
reproducible from the banks rather than hand-maintained.

Two things were wrong with the old set:

Pitch. Every shipped WAV was flat 44100 Hz with the banks' tuning discarded,
so 202 of the 219 zones played at the wrong speed - the worst by nine
semitones. The EMU8000's per-zone root key and tuning are now baked into
each file's declared sample rate, which is exact and needs no engine change.
Layers that were meant to be deep now are: a collision sub-thud that lasted
18 milliseconds at the wrong rate is a 0.66 second one at 1228 Hz.

Missing layers. 93 presets were short of zones and 176 were missing outright,
219 of 395. Nothing was lost recovering them - the 46 preset slots that
disappeared were all empty placeholders. The old files were also over-read,
running past the end of their sample into whatever PCM came next;
WellheadDrill02a was six seconds where the bank says eight hundred
milliseconds. Every one of the 395 files now matches its bank record exactly.

Also baked in: per-zone layer attenuation, and the static resonant low-pass
the EMU8000 applied in hardware.

Measured while doing it, and worth knowing: RP's banks contain no key-splits
at all - every multi-zone preset is a pure layer stack - and no preset has
more than four zones, which is what the engine's own "AWE appears to only
play 1st 4 voices" warning has been asserting since 1995.

Still to do: loop regions and the release fades, which 349 zones ask for and
which need new SAMPLEINFO fields. And voice demand per sound has gone from
about one zone to about two and a half, so the per-event alGenSources and
alDeleteSources churn roughly doubles - the BT tree measured pooling as the
fix for that, and a CPU win besides.

Builds clean. The extreme baked rates, 1228 Hz up to 88200, were checked
through the real path - libsndfile, alBufferData, alSourcePlay - and all
load. Not yet listened to on the pod.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-05 23:16:13 -05:00
CydandClaude Opus 5 ce1b0ab9c3 Sounds fade, dull and doppler with distance again
The OpenAL port kept the whole authored audio model and then threw most of
its output away. Every frame the engine computed a distance-attenuation
curve, a high-frequency rolloff, doppler cents, a reverb level and a
front/rear placement, and every one of those consumers had been commented
out when the two AWE32 cards were replaced. What reached the speakers was
OpenAL's own defaults instead: a straight-line fade to silence, no
filtering, doppler at the wrong constants with an inverted velocity, no
reverb, and every cockpit sound dead centre.

Restored, per AUDIO.INI, which is byte-identical to the file that shipped
in August 1995:

  - the authored knee/rolloff distance curve, replacing AL_LINEAR_DISTANCE.
    This also un-blinds the transient cull, the voice-steal weighting and
    the mix ducking, which all key off it and were treating far sources as
    full presence
  - the CC7 squared volume law; writing the scale linearly ran everything
    about 6 dB hot at mid-scale
  - brightness and distance muffling, and the wet-exterior/dry-cockpit
    reverb split, both through a new OpenAL EFX bridge
  - doppler on the moving-source path only, as the original had it
  - front/rear placement from the authored position enum

The larger find is that AL_PITCH was never called anywhere in the tree, so
the entire pitch chain was inert - not only doppler but pitch_mix_offset,
which our own sequences author 97 times. Doppler alone would have changed
nothing audible.

Note pitch is applied for parity with the BT engine but is identity here:
our content predates NoteAudioControlID, so every source runs at note 60.

Builds clean on VS2022 Release|Win32. Smoke-tested against vRIO on COM1 -
reaches gameplay and holds a steady frame loop. ALC_EXT_EFX is present on
the build machine with all nine entry points, so the filter and reverb work
is live rather than inert. Not yet listened to on the pod, which is the
real test: the volume law changes the level of everything.

docs/SOUND.md documents the original two-card quadraphonic design, where
the surviving original assets are, and what remains.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-05 23:00:37 -05:00