Multiple sounds playing at once - how?

[Karl Becker]

On Dec 4, 2003, at 3:23 PM, Scott Rossi wrote:
>> I'm looking for suggestions on how to get multiple sounds to play at
>> once using MetaCard 2.4.3.
>
> There is no native option other than player objects (which you claim 
> eat up
> processor time but if you're making a game, I'm not sure why that's a
> problem).

Well, not only does it eat up the processor, but it seems to actually 
take away from MetaCard's processing power.  My games cannot actually 
run at full speed - not to mention every other single thing on the 
computer is slow - when running any sort of QuickTime player.  I've had 
this happen to me on multiple computers, so I don't think it's a 
function of a single setup.  This is on an iMac 800, too, so there 
should be no real problems with doing this.

> It's a sad state of affairs.

I might tend to agree... though it is true that MC/Revolution is 
probably not the #1 game development tool of choice  ;-)

> One thing you might try is using a combination of one player and 
> imported
> sounds.

I may very well give that a shot.  I'll try setting the filename to 
empty, too, to see if that does anything to alleviate processor usage.  
It's usually the skip that really messes things up though - I used to 
use the "play videoclip" command, but that introduces a horrendous 
pause in MetaCard that totally wrecks the fluidity of my tennis game  
(all action just stops for a quarter of a second, which is horribly 
annoying after about 3 times).

> If you want a sound to loop seamlessly (often difficult if not
> impossible in MC/Rev), you must use an imported sound for this since 
> players
> will not loop seamlessly.

Something needs to be done about this.  It couldn't be too hard - does 
the new Revolution take care of any of this?

> If you are developing for Mac OS only and for systems lower than OSX

Unfortunately, I want to have it on Windows... and my development 
system is Mac OS X, so, no go  :-)
Also, the fmod external isn't quite what I'm looking for, as Scott 
pointed out.

> Regarding players and processor issues, have you tried setting the 
> fileName
> of player objects to empty in between playing sounds?  Also, are you 
> using
> the latest version of QT?

I believe so, yes.  6.4.  Though I haven't tried a player object in 
some time, mostly because I know what it'll do to MC... maybe I'll try 
again over Christmas break.

Thanks,
Karl