Organizing Sound Options
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The sound options screen - the one with a whole lot of checkmarks for which sounds you want to hear.
I was looking to check whether I had it set to hear Slaps, took a bit looking through the full list to find it.It'd be nice to have the sound options screen be a bit more organized; with some subsections (most notably a subsection for chat sounds, as those get tweaked more than in-game sounds). I don't know which other things might be worthy as a section, or to what extent people use which options.
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@zlefin Sound support and development seems to be of the very lowest priority to the developers (and many players). Map maker sound possibilities are also very limited and primitive.
Sadly I don’t see this changing in the near future … unless a dev magically turns up with a burning desire to radically improve the audio side of TripleA
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It would be great to get the sound settings into the 'settings' window. As part of that, organizing them to like 'game' and 'chat' categories would makes sense.
Though I think the assessment is right, we have very little development capability and a long backlog of numerous projects and fixes that are all competing for priority and time.
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For me personally, the biggest problem with the sound is that it is VERY LOUD. You ask, why not just turn the volume down on my computer? Okay fine. But then if I'm listening to something on YouTube or performing some other task which requires sound, I've now just made the sound too quiet for me to hear.
Ideally, what I'd like to see is a volume control, allowing you to adjust the volume level of the sounds that TripleA makes. You'd set it from 0 to 10, with 0 being mute and 10 being the current volume level. I'd probably set it to something around a 5.
The obvious problem with turning off sound for TripleA is that then you'd don't get to hear when it's your turn or when someone slaps you. Muted volume causes game delay.
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@kurtgodel7 Good points, I sure know that I cringe whenever anyone new installs the game and the first thing they experience is an ear-shattering air raid siren.
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Java is so annoying! I looked into volume adjusting; and it looks like it'd be some real effort to implement. In part cause the code uses some alternate and ancient clip player; so it'd probably have to be first be refactored to use the standard javax one. The java one itself is silly complicated for no good reason; you have to run through a bunch of steps and conversions to get stuff done; there's no simple direct built-in option for "just play this clip file darnit!"
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@zlefin said in Organizing Sound Options:
Java is so annoying! I looked into volume adjusting; and it looks like it'd be some real effort to implement. In part cause the code uses some alternate and ancient clip player; so it'd probably have to be first be refactored to use the standard javax one. The java one itself is silly complicated for no good reason; you have to run through a bunch of steps and conversions to get stuff done; there's no simple direct built-in option for "just play this clip file darnit!"
I appreciate the effort you made to look into this. It's unfortunate that the solution isn't easy, and that Java has imposed an unnecessary layer of complexity. Due to the difficulty of using Java in and of itself, a software developer I know built a platform which rests on top of Java. If you want to build something you use the platform, which then uses Java to implement. However, that was years ago, and he hasn't updated his platform, which does not work with current versions of Java.
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I did a writeup in git of the dev details of what I found about the difficulty of adding a volume adjustment; since I'd already done the code-diving it made sense to do a writeup to save someone else some work in the future if they decide to do it. I just made it is a generic issue, wasn't really sure where exactly to put it. At any rate, if anyone wants to look at the pieces of the code involved and the implementation challenges:
https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/issues/9139
open Master volume control #9139
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@zlefin said in Organizing Sound Options:
I did a writeup in git of the dev details of what I found about the difficulty of adding a volume adjustment; since I'd already done the code-diving it made sense to do a writeup to save someone else some work in the future if they decide to do it. I just made it is a generic issue, wasn't really sure where exactly to put it. At any rate, if anyone wants to look at the pieces of the code involved and the implementation challenges:
That sounds like a good approach. Hopefully someone will have the time to address this at some point. Maybe some future update of Java will be more developer-friendly?
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@zlefin I think the reason for the current selection is to play mp3s. I recall the out-of-the-box player does not like that format. If things have changed, then the OOB one is preferable.
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Hmm, it looks like you're right, and java doesn't support mp3 for some stupid reason. It's hard to be sure, as every google search finds links that are nearly a decade old, and the documentation for the current version of java doesn't say which audio formats are supported. I can't find any clean answer on exactly what formats current java's built-in stuff supports. It's sad that it's so hard to find a straightforward answer to such a basic question; it really seems like the kind of thing that should be straightforward to find in their documentation. How hard is it for them to just clearly say which audio file formats are supported?
