2010-10-25

Hoshi bug fixes

I'm making an effort to get Whirligig released (hopefully this week, maybe even today, I'm not sure how long it will take to do what I want with it).
In doing so, one of the things that needs implementing is sound. I have all the sounds I need ready and I had Hoshi's sound engine. So, no problem, yes?

Well, Hoshi's sound engine isn't perfect. It actually causes the game to crash randomly when OpenAL isn't installed. This is a fairly major issue, so I decided to go back and fix this on Hoshi before moving the engine across to Whirligig.
Whilst I was working on the engine I quickly added a simple substitute for the sound when OpenAL isn't installed. This uses .NET's or Mono's System.Media.SoundPlayer. This isn't ideal because it will only play one sound at a time with no mixing and Hoshi requires many sounds to be playing at once to sound correct. But it's a good substitute for those who don't want to go searching for OpenAL.

So, now Hoshi will work out of the box with sound, although you'll get a much better experience with OpenAL installed. There's also an additional option in the hoshioptions.xml file in AppData that allows changing the sound engine. So you can set it off, set it to the Media.SoundPlayer option or set it to OpenAL. There's also a ForceOpenAL option which skips any checks for OpenAL and is not really recommended as it will cause the same crashing issues as before if used on a system without OpenAL.

Anyway, new release is here.
These are purely bugfixes, if the version of Hoshi you have already doesn't have issues you won't gain anything from this new version.

And now I can do some work on Whirligig.

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