Today it's mostly been the sound subsystem getting some tweaks. Sound is just as important as visuals for giving a sense of immersion, but the worlds of Quake are such quiet places. You get the occasional buzzing computer or crackling torch, but that's really all. This makes it even more critical to have decent sound handling.
Now, Quake's original sound system was designed for a P60 with 8MB of RAM running DOS. This means that there are quite a few constraints and artificial limitations in it. These go beyond obvious factors such as sampling rates and quality, and include things like the channel mixer, sound allocations, reuse and combination of sounds, and so on. Which is where today's work has been focussed.
DirectQ is now able to mix from up tp 65536 sound channels. These are dynamically allocated as required and cleared every map load to ease memory pressure. It's also far less gung-ho about reusing channels than the original sound engine was, which altogether gives a much higher quality, crisper and cleaner end result.
Another nice result.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Sound
Posted by
mhquake
at
6:46 PM
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