64 replies to this topic

[GeN1e]

Got hit by it in BGT game, all three first major areas (Candlekeep, crossroad, FAI), haven't checked any farther yet.

What's the current status on this problem? I've searched the forum, but there doesn't seem to be any advance made in solving it.

I recall there were assumptions it may be caused by ARE and sounds not being in the same biff, but apparently that is not the case. Many vanilla BG2 area are stored separately from their sounds, without any lag. I've put AR6600.ARE and it's four ambients into one biff, and this also had zero impact.

I'm a little at loss where to dig now

[Azazello]

Have you tried any of these?

[GeN1e]

Those are script stutters, while I'm talking about the ambient one. The common solution is to turn ambient sounds off in BGconfig.exe, but this is not really a fix, just a crude workaround - and I want to get to the bottom of it, now that I can reproduce this bug once again.

I have tried to replace the "ocean" AMB_E10A reference with "birds chirping" AMB_E05E. If it was bad before, then it became utterly unbearable now.
Tried to replace the ocean WAV with an empty one - no effect.

This leads me to believe that water sounds are not responsible, even though the stutter usually happens in areas with lots of water running.

[Azazello]

I'm with you, I should have been more specific...

Have you considered either doing the low-level digging Suslik did for scripts, to determine why ambient sounds can cause stutters; or encourage someone like him(her) to do it?

I don't know if you have such code-fu to do it - I certainly don't.

[GeN1e]

As it happens, the above case was due to unbiffed override. However, I did found a true ambient stutter after some time, in ar8200 and ar8100 areas of Baldur's Gate.

An interesting discovery I have made, is that the stutter consistently disappears after entering any minor area in the above-mentioned locations, saving there, and loading it.

Stutter consistently re-occurs in the following cases:
1) save-loading while present in the affected area
2) entering the area via worldmap
3) using MoveToArea() console command to get there

[Miloch]

BGT at least fixed the missing ambients error, though there are still missing ones in Tutu and BG1 (plainab also wrote a fix for those though I don't know where it is at present). As for errors with existing ambients, I don't know how you would fix it other than by reproduction and process of elimination. In other words, if you hit stutter in one particular area, hack the ambients out of the .are file in the .sav one by one until you figure out which one(s) it is. Could be an issue like a bitrate error or something like that.

[GeN1e]

I've seen those threads. It's not about missing files but existing ones. And while your suspicions about broken water WAVs may seem valid, I did try to replace them with other sounds - and it kept on stuttering.

More importantly, why the hell would the game decide whether or not to stutter, depending on how I get into the affected area?

[Miloch]

More importantly, why the hell would the game decide whether or not to stutter, depending on how I get into the affected area?

Ambients have a position and a radius, so they fire off in different parts of areas. For some reason, the obvious didn't occur to me at first after reading your post, but it must have occurred to you. So to get back to what I said, there are problems with specific ambients rather than ambients in general, that would require elimination testing to track down.

Edit: they also have (or don't have, depending on the setting) a random sound selection factor within each ambient, so you would have to account for that as well.

Edited by Miloch, 05 July 2012 - 12:18 PM.

[Miloch]

You could also use a script or the CLUA console to PlaySound() every ambient in the area to figure out which are causing the issue.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Even when removing one of the ambient wavs from the bif and then removing it from override as well, it *still* plays inside the area in the game. Honestly, where is the game getting its file info from?

Erhm, how did you manage to do what... the .bif files are file archive ... you need to remove the whole .bif to actually do, you can pass the rest of the files to the override folder so the game has access to them... and the file can actually be stored in multiple .bif files. So you don't need to change the CD...

[Miloch]

Yeah, area files are stored in saved games. Which area did you see the problem in, Shin? Could be there's some wonky settings on that one that aren't on others where it's used or something.