Approaches to sound in The Lurking Horror

[Mike_G (Mike)]

@Draconis

@Mike_G

Approach 1 Synchronous:
Within a turn, when a second sound is played before the first has finished, pause the z-machine until one iteration of the first sound completes, then play the second sound and resume execution. A stop instruction issued for a sound started this turn also results in this wait state until the sound to be stopped has completed at least one iteration.

Personally, I think this is a fine way to handle it. It’s close to the original behavior, and avoids adding too much complexity for a case that probably won’t come up outside this.

I’m leaning this way. The only weirdness would be if a game played a bunch of sounds back to back or used very long playing samples. Everyone promises to never do that, right?

@Draconis

@Mike_G

The music channel was added post-Infocom and so was not a part of any of their games.

And also, as far as I know, has never been used? I vaguely remember it being deprecated.

I don’t know if it was ever used, but I don’t remember it being deprecated anywhere.

[DavidG (David Griffith)]

The only thing deprecated is the SONG format, which to my knowledge has never been adequately documented or even implemented. OGG is still available and is mostly intended for ambient background noises. The chanting and drumming in TLH, if done today, should be in OGG chunks.

I haven’t thought of a really good use for MOD tracks in interactive fiction.

[Mike_G (Mike)]

@DavidG

The chanting and drumming in TLH, if done today, should be in OGG chunks.

Surely they should be AIFF to maintain the original behavior? Using OGG would make them music instead of sampled sounds and might cause sounds to play concurrently instead of interrupt each other. I’m not certain if the exact sequence of sounds in TLH would reveal this difference without some testing.

[Mike_G (Mike)]

@DavidG

I haven’t thought of a really good use for MOD tracks in interactive fiction.

I’d love to see MOD files used as background music. I used to have a decent mod collection in the early to mid 90’s.

[DavidG (David Griffith)]

My reasoning is that the chanting and drumming is going on continuously over several turns. That’s exactly what that channel is for.

[Mike_G (Mike)]

For a story that written since Standard 1.1, yes.
For a V3 game like The Lurking Horror, the looping chunk in a blorb, or the looping metadata in an original Infocom SND file controls that.

It may make no difference in reality. I’d have to test it, but at the moment I’m rewriting my interpreter’s code that controls sound so I can’t.

[Adam_S (Adam Sommerfield)]

If it makes you feel any better, I was up till 3am last night (or this morning) trying to get sound effects to play! I’m coding directly in ZIL, I’ve tried without Blorb and then with Blorb, had advice from helpful people and still can’t get it to output sound.

My Blorb (and Blurb) are the same name as my game file, I’ve got V5 and V6 game files, I’ve tried both AIFF and OGG audio types.

The game compiles, runs ok, but when the sound file plays there’s just the sound of silence.

Adam

[DavidG (David Griffith)]

What are you using to process the blurb file and build the blorb file?

[DavidG (David Griffith)]

@Mike_G

I’d love to see MOD files used as background music. I used to have a decent mod collection in the early to mid 90’s.

I still have my MOD file collection. So far, the only thing I’ve used a MOD in a game is for my soundtest “interactive noisemaker” demo game.

[cas (Chris Spiegel)]

At least L. Ross Raszewski’s “Moments Out of Time” uses a MOD for background music (it starts playing as soon as the game starts up).