[z-machine] [Spec 1.1] Sound

[David Fillmore]

On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, Jason Penney wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm realize I'm comming back to this rather late, but I was unable to give this
> much thought back in August when David and David where talking about it.
>
> That being said, I do think that David Kinder said everything I wanted to say.
> The original proposal seems more flexible to me in every way except one (how
> can I stop just one instance sound X if more than one instance of X is
> currently playing).  This could be worked around by storing a sound you planned
> to use in this manor multiple times in the resource file (i.e. sounds 4-12 are
> all the same sound, but now you can stop just one of them).  Wasteful, but it
> would work.
>
> The original proposal also had a nice priority system for channel exhaustion
> that isn't present in David Fillmore's proposal (becaues you only have X
> channels no matter what is playing) which I feel makes it less flexible.

I spent some time, actually, working on a system that fixed all problems,
and allowed for the user to check if a sound was going to be playable
before hand (which is the main thing I felt was missing from the current
proposal) and still allowed the terp to simply play as many sounds as it
could at any given time.

I came up with a few ideas, with varying degrees of usefulness and
ugliness, before deciding nobody actually cared.

> 1.1 was first proposed in December 2001, and it seems that sound is the only
> remaining sticking point.

I think there were a couple of other problems I had with it, but I can't
remember what, and sound was definitely the big one. This being the case,
I'm highly tempted to suggest pulling extended sound support from the 1.1
spec completely, and just leaving sound precisely as it is in the 1.0 spec
(one channel, one sound, no overlapping).

--
Fillmore