[directmusic] Re: Creating, downloading and unloading segments with DirectMusic
- From: "Vytautas Leonavicius" <vytas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <directmusic@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 21:15:03 +0300
Thank you very much for your reply. I'll keep in mind your advice about
deactivating audiopaths. It's also very easy to implement this thing.
Recently I found interesting thing - after I enabled performance's
AutoDownload global parameter, now I have no crashes. All sounds are playing
(without download) and loader loads as many sounds as I need. However, two
things still unclear:
how auto downloading works? Is it somehow managed to avoid unneccesary work?
Does it impacts app. performance? From DX help it looks like only segment
timing is affected, that is not critical for me.
Also, I ignored this flag for a long time, because based on documentation,
autodownloading is related to bands, while I am using only wave files. How
bands relate with segments?
Vytautas
----- Original Message -----
From: "Abhijit Patait" <abhijit_patait@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <directmusic@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 8:36 PM
Subject: [directmusic] Re: Creating, downloading and unloading segments with
DirectMusic
> Hello Vytautas
>
> I cannot comment on the problem of downloading too many segments (as I
> haven't encountered this problem).
>
> One thing I can suggest about Audiopaths is that you should manualy
> activate and de-activate the audiopaths when they are used/unused. I read
> somewhere (don't remember where) that even if you are not playing anything
> on an audiopath, it still keeps sending silence frames to the synthesizer,
> and takes up CPU resources. You can use the API
> IDirectMusicAudiopath8::Activate(...) to de-activate the audiopath. You
> should see significant reduction in system resource usage after
> de-activating the paths.
>
> Abhijit
> Vytautas Leonavicius <vytas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello Group,
> I'll be very thankful for any help, cause I really need it.
>
> I am developing sound subsystem in our game. It uses DirectMusic API. I
> got lots of troubles with DirectMusic, so I begin to suspect that the main
> problem is in my wrong model of using DirectMusic. I addition to lack of
> information on that's going on inside DM, I got stuck finally.
>
> I started this way - I loaded all segments from files based on list of
> filenames. Later, I downloaded them all onto performance. The problem was
> with download - it failed if too many sounds were downloaded. Then I
> introduced some kind of cache, that managed all segments, and unloaded
> least useful, while downloading new ones. That worked. For some time.
> Later, I faced another problem. Instead of creating all segment files at
> startup, I created them on first use. After this modfication, I found that
> now I am able to download much more segments than prior to that! So, looks
> like IDirectMusicLoader and IDirectMusicSegment::Download, affect each
> other - the less segments you load from file, the more segments downloaded
> onto performance successfully and vice versa.
> Another weird thing, is that both loader and segment downloading fail with
> same return value. : DMUS_E_LOADER_FAILEDOPEN File open failed because the
> file does not exist or is locked. From above, looks like
> CreateSegmentFromFile and Download affect some shared memory or resource,
> however, return value is saying nothing about memory etc.
>
> So it looks like I am doing something wrong, cause while searching forums,
> I found no topics with similar problems.
>
> When should I create segments from wave files? Should I destroy/create
> them again during runtime, and that's more important, how many of them
> could be created at once, without being afraid of crash? When should I
> download and unload them? Is DMUS_E_LOADER_FAILEDOPEN saying: "too many
> segments created, release some then retry"?
>
> Another problem is with audiopaths. I am using separate audiopath per each
> sound with separate volume. And I noticed, that even if I don't use
> audiopaths, just create them, they slow down application. I suppose I'll
> going to implement some audiopath sharing between sounds, however, what is
> 'too many audiopaths"? How many audiopaths are allowed without noticeable
> perfromance penalty?
>
> Weird thing, I don't know how many segments are allowed to be created from
> file at once, I don't know how many of them could be downloaded at once,
> and same thing with audiopaths. In DM documentation no single word about
> all these things...
>
> Vytautas
>
>
>
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