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>
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>
CydandClaude Opus 5