[Scummvm-devel] Simon the Sorcerer appears to leak all it's audio ram

[Neil Millstone]

Travis Howell wrote:

> From: "Max Horn" <max at quendi.de>
>   
>> > 1) Neil's way, which silently ignores if a failure occurs to load a sound
>> > (this change would be inside an #ifdef DS, of course). Kirben is opposed
>> > to this, quoting additional bug reports which would supposedly turn up.
>> > Kirben, can you please elaborate a bit on this -- what kind of bugs would
>> > crop up due to this?
>>     
>
> A specific animation is started, when playing any speech and the animation's 
> script will frequently check to see if the current speech has ended. So this 
> could cause graphical glitches or timer issues, depending on the scene. In 
> this particular case, Simon will appear to be endlessly talking, until a 
> wait timeout occurs or the users skips the scene.
>   

Yes, Simon's mouth will move for the time the speech sample would have 
been played for, but no sound is heard.
>   
>> > As it is, though, I can *imagine* situations where a player is confused
>> > because of missing some text. But do those actually occur? So far I am
>> > only aware of this problem occuring in the intro, where missing the text
>> > is completly harmless. Does it occur in any other spot?
>> > And did we get any bug reports over this for the 0.9.x series?
>>     
>
> Unfortunately the point where the large speech segment occurs in Simon the 
> Sorcerer 1, is when Simon reads the letter explaining the story of the game. 
> So the user would get no speech or subtitles in this scene, and have no idea 
> what is written in the letter.
>   
Yes, that's true.  It does contain some instructions.

> Extracting the individual VOC/WAV files, shows all other speech segments are 
> much smaller (460KB or less), so doesn't seem like it will occur elsewhere 
> in Simon the Sorcerer 1.
>   
So we're arguing about one single voice sample.  To me, this hardly 
seems important.
> Another option could be the forced use of compressed speech file in DS port, 
> adding a GUI error/warning if uncompressed speech files is detected. 
> Although I'm not sure if the DS ports can handle Simon the Sorcerer 1/2, 
> along with decoding compressed speech. 
Yes, MP3 audio is supported and works fine.  But many of the users will 
have trouble doing the compression.  Lame for Win32 can be hard to find 
and lots of people are scared or unable to using the command line.  So I 
don't think limiting the audio to MP3 only would be a good idea.  
Although a warning message would be ok.

I have a fix ready to run which has the same behaviour as 0.9.1 
(skipping samples that don't fit into RAM).  Should I commit that?

I also have a few other minor fixes to some engine code I'm planning to 
submit to the patch tracker for review.

- Neil