Sound pushes

Reven · Post by **Reven** » Tue Sep 26, 2006 4:21 pm

What would people say to a sound system that had the capacity for sound pushes? Basically the same thing for sounds that we have now for tiles.

This would give the ability for map-writers and scripters to script in sounds without having everyone have to download new clients to take advantage of it. Town criers announcing things, clock towers that chime the hour (or maybe not considering how fast time runs), talking quest text, a fanfare when a Prince of Scorn enters the castle.

Broadband is getting close to universal - might as well take advantage of it. Of course, it would have to be used wisely, and it would have to cache - I would suggest that if the feature is turned on that caching is mandatory.

Rednaxela · Post by **Rednaxela** » Tue Sep 26, 2006 6:10 pm

I've already noted that possibility on the wiki here: http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/dev_todo:fix_sound

Some issues are:

Bandwidth: Sure most people have broadband, however this could be a very large additional load to servers.
Image transfers are done synchronously in both server and client, which is fine for images because crossfire's png tiles are so tiny, however for sound files the transfer would need to be asynchronous to avoid lag due to their size. This however means we would either need to: add significant changes to the main loops of both client and server, use threads and use a seperate port, or pass transfer off to a http (or similar) server.
And also, how would we deal with delay to play the sound the first time due to downloading? Or should we avoid that altogether by downloadign all sounds upon connection?