Increase Sound Limit

[MAED]

I am currently working on a map that uses hell of a lot custom sounds. Many gun firing and vehicle sounds are played as 3D sounds on different locations. The problem with Warcraft seems to be some kind of sound limit. This means, if there is a lot of action going on and units are shooting and driving around a lot, these sounds are particularly not played.

I somewhere heart that there is a limit of 16 sounds that can run at the same time or something like that. At least there has to be some limit to 3D sounds, otherwise there would be no explanation to this. Does anyone know a way to increase this limit?

 

[Dr Super Good]

Does anyone know a way to increase this limit?

There is no way.

The limit is in place to restrict the resources spent on sound playback. Something that was especially important when WC3 was written since there was no standardized sound driver interface with well defined capabilities. Many old systems used hardware acceleration for sound processing which logically only supports a limited number of channels. All old games suffer similar problems.

More recent games like SC2 support a configurable number of channels. It is worth noting that more channels usually results in more CPU overhead due to the mixing involved.

Generally you can run more flat sounds than 3D sounds. You might be able to perform a rough emulation of 3D sound using flat sounds and current camera position to determine if audible and to modify pitch. I am not sure if WC3 limit applies to both 3D and flat sounds however in the case of games like Freelancer you could have considerably more flat sounds playing at once than 3D sounds, to the point that 3D sound was not preferable.

 

[MAED]

Thanks for the information.

I have tried that camera position thing, but when playing the map in multiplayer mode, the game is dissynchonised drawing the players unable to move their units at the same time. They actually have to wait until a player has stopped doing something.
In that case, I will leave it as it is.

 

[Dr Super Good]

I have tried that camera position thing, but when playing the map in multiplayer mode, the game is dissynchonised drawing the players unable to move their units at the same time. They actually have to wait until a player has stopped doing something.

Sounds like lag to me. If they lost synchronization the server would drop them (unless it is a robot set to allow OOS game play). I am guessing the lag is caused by the net traffic generated to synchronize the camera location.

 

[Ezekiel12]

I am guessing the lag is caused by the net traffic generated to synchronize the camera location.

Camera in wc3 is purely local, isn't it?

 

[Dr Super Good]

Camera in wc3 is purely local, isn't it?

Except when you request it to be synchronized?

I know in SC2 it is synchronized all the time as part of their "anti-maphack" defence system.

 

[Ezekiel12]

Except when you request it to be synchronized?

Which function does execute such a request? Apart from manually syncing it ofc..

 

[Wietlol]

What about special effects?
Special effects create sounds on their own and each special effect has its own sounds so 2 of the same effects create 2 sounds.

I dont know how they are added to the model which relates to the sound but that could work.

 

[MAED]

In that case I would have to use wave files to replace the special effect sounds with them. Unfortunately, this would also increase the map file size too much. I am using mp3 files which cannot replace standart sounds, which, except for music, are wav.