Frogcomposband: sound?

[anselmus]

I have been trying, with no luck, several days to enable sound on Frogcomposband. If I compile Frogcomposband (7.1 or 7.0) from sources with linux (with no "visible" errors), just no option for enable sound inside game menu ('='): gcu, curses or x11: it's the same. And I can't find any config file (neither with grep -rin 'sound') for enable it. If I launch the precompiled Windows version of the game, I can enable 'sound' option (not from x11 GUI, only from config file), but anyway the sound is not working. I've been trying with different sound.cfg setups (on lib/xtra/sound/sound.cfg) and different .wav compressions, but, again, with no luck.

Can someone give me any clue?
For get working sounds on linux, preferably.

I'm very interested fixing this: as an ascii game lover, and as sound-textures lover, I think that ambient & fx sounds are about 80% of the inmersion, and I have a big sound library of sounds for roguelikes waiting for Frogcomposband!! XD

Thanks you very much in advance.

[Sideways]

Originally Posted by anselmus

I have been trying, with no luck, several days to enable sound on Frogcomposband. If I compile Frogcomposband (7.1 or 7.0) from sources with linux (with no "visible" errors), just no option for enable sound inside game menu ('='): gcu, curses or x11: it's the same. And I can't find any config file (neither with grep -rin 'sound') for enable it. If I launch the precompiled Windows version of the game, I can enable 'sound' option (not from x11 GUI, only from config file), but anyway the sound is not working. I've been trying with different sound.cfg setups (on lib/xtra/sound/sound.cfg) and different .wav compressions, but, again, with no luck.

Can someone give me any clue?
For get working sounds on linux, preferably.

I'm very interested fixing this: as an ascii game lover, and as sound-textures lover, I think that ambient & fx sounds are about 80% of the inmersion, and I have a big sound library of sounds for roguelikes waiting for Frogcomposband!! XD

Thanks you very much in advance.

You are the second player in the last few days, and also the second in the last few years, to ask about the sounds Are sounds the latest in thing?

The only sound in the game "as is" is an audible error bell which you can turn on in the disturbance options, there are no other sounds. However, the game can theoretically support a large variety of other sounds, it's just that there are no actual sound files and USE_SOUND is commented out in the source code.

What you should be able to do is get the FrogComposband source (any version, but the latest dev version on github is the most up-to-date), locate the bit in z-config.h where "#define USE_SOUND" is commented out, move it out of the comment, recompile, then add your own .wav files and map them to game events in sound.cfg. (As you can probably guess, this hasn't been tested very extensively... but it ought to not break the game.)

[anselmus]

Originally Posted by Sideways

You are the second player in the last few days, and also the second in the last few years, to ask about the sounds Are sounds the latest in thing?

The only sound in the game "as is" is an audible error bell which you can turn on in the disturbance options, there are no other sounds. However, the game can theoretically support a large variety of other sounds, it's just that there are no actual sound files and USE_SOUND is commented out in the source code.

What you should be able to do is get the FrogComposband source (any version, but the latest dev version on github is the most up-to-date), locate the bit in z-config.h where "#define USE_SOUND" is commented out, move it out of the comment, recompile, then add your own .wav files and map them to game events in sound.cfg. (As you can probably guess, this hasn't been tested very extensively... but it ought to not break the game.)

Thanks a lot, Sideways.

About make the sound work on Frogcomposband:

maybe I'm doing something wrong: I have tried commenting out 'define USE_SOUND' but it seems does not work (no errors output when 'make'). Looking the source files (stating that my programming skills are very basic) and doing some test (by trial/error method) I've noticed some ¿strange things?: Frogcomposband (v. 7.0 and 7.1 at least) has very similar code than Poschengband v7.2.1, but there are some differences on the use of 'use_sound' term that might be in relation with this question. If I do a search with 'grep' command for 'use_sound', I have the same results with Frogcomposband code and Poschengband code (the term 'use_sound' appears on same files and is commented by default in the same lines), but, in Poschengband case, grep says that 'use_sound' is present on some binary files and in Frogcomposband case not: specificaly, 'use_sound' appears (in Poschengband 7.1), in 'main-x11.o', 'poschengband.exe', 'util.o', 'variable.o', and 'main-gcu.o', but in Frogcomposband, in these files is not present 'use_sound'. Sounds works with Poschengband v.7.2.1, on Windows version at least, but I'm not able to make it work when I compile Linux version. I guess sound it's possible to make it work on Linux because on most vanilla versions of Angband it is working. I've check the dependencies, but my system seems to have installed all of them. I'm pretty sure that I'm leaving out something obvious, but I don't know what!

Any clues?

About the interest of sounds themself (and specially for ascii games):

In short: I think/feel that "hearing" it's "touching" in no different meaning than touching "with hands". It depends, obviously, on the fidelity/quality of the sounds sources/medias. Graphics are less important, in my opinion, for this: the interest about ascii graphics is that, when you start seeing things, not the symbols of things, you have a very wide range for feel/imagine (automatically; I mean: subconscious) the surrounding world of the game, but, in the other hand, this range is too wide in terms of immersion. So, yes: I think/feel that reasonable quality sounds + ascii graphics it's "the latest in things"!! XD (at least "the latest in videogame things"). Less abstract graphics than ascii are better for a fast immersion (they are symbols too, but more "usual", so better for selling huge copies of the same old crap), but these kind of graphics narrow the range for feel/imagine worlds too much, and good quality sounds can't do nothing to counter it (it's more difficult expand limits than cut them). It's an opinion, just my experience. Anyway, if you try Cataclysm DDA, for example, with ascii and a decent soundpack, it's brutal: very hard to forget the impression of this experience.

[Sideways]

"#define USE_SOUND" is already commented out. You have to make it not be commented out - remove the /* and */ around #define USE_SOUND in z-config.h, then compile. (PosChengband 7.2.1 has made this exact change, that's the reason you're seeing different behavior there.)

[anselmus]

Originally Posted by Sideways

"#define USE_SOUND" is already commented out. You have to make it not be commented out - remove the /* and */ around #define USE_SOUND in z-config.h, then compile. (PosChengband 7.2.1 has made this exact change, that's the reason you're seeing different behavior there.)

Yes, sorry, this is what I'm doing. Removing the /* and */ around. Like this:

...

#ifdef USE_SPECIAL

/*
* OPTION: Allow the use of "sound" in various places.
*/
#define USE_SOUND

/*
* OPTION: Allow the use of "graphics" in various places
*/
#define USE_GRAPHICS

...

Edit: Oh, another thing: I don't know if it's relevant, but differences I noticed between *.o files on Frogcomposband and PosChengband are checked before compile process

[Sideways]

The .o files are created when you compile, of course there are 1000s of differences between FrogComposband and PosChengband, but the ones that concern use_sound specifically will disappear after you (successfully) compile with USE_SOUND defined in z-config.h. (If they don't, that means the compile itself was flawed, try compiling with "make clean" or manually delete all .o files before compiling.)

[anselmus]

Originally Posted by Sideways

The .o files are created when you compile, of course there are 1000s of differences between FrogComposband and PosChengband, but the ones that concern use_sound specifically will disappear after you (successfully) compile with USE_SOUND defined in z-config.h. (If they don't, that means the compile itself was flawed, try compiling with "make clean" or manually delete all .o files before compiling.)

My mistake: yes, .o files that I checked were made after compiling.

Now: I try with 'make clean' but it's the same. But I noticed something new: if I launch the game with './frogcomposband -v', there is an ouput on the terminal each time the game should trigger a sound:

sh: 1: ./playwave.sh: not found

Maybe I'm doing something wrong on compile process (or maybe have I to define something like default paths somewhere?). I'm following this steps:
$ sh ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure --with-no-install [I've tried with --enable-sdl-mixer too]
$ make

and then I launch the game from /src folder with

$ ./frogcomposband -mgcu [or -mx11]

[Sideways]

That sounds like an X11-specific problem, I can see what the problem is (it's telling the system to run a non-existent shell script) and the solution presumably involves fixing its nonexistence, unfortunately I'm a fake programmer who don't speak .sh. How do you normally play .wav files from the command line?

My instinct is that a playwave.sh that looked about like this should work:

#!/bin/sh

if [ "$1" != "" ]; then
aplay $1
fi

But we probably have dozens of people here who know how it's actually done, hopefully this horror-movie script will induce some input from them.

[backwardsEric]

Sideways' script looks pretty good. I'd use

#!/bin/sh

if test X"$1" != X ; then
    exec aplay "$1"
fi
exit 1

Put that in playwave.sh in the same directory as the frogcomposband executable and run

chmod a+x playwave.sh

on it to make it executable.

[anselmus]

Originally Posted by Sideways

That sounds like an X11-specific problem, I can see what the problem is (it's telling the system to run a non-existent shell script) and the solution presumably involves fixing its nonexistence, unfortunately I'm a fake programmer who don't speak .sh. How do you normally play .wav files from the command line?

My instinct is that a playwave.sh that looked about like this should work:

#!/bin/sh

if [ "$1" != "" ]; then
aplay $1
fi

But we probably have dozens of people here who know how it's actually done, hopefully this horror-movie script will induce some input from them.

Thanks you very much for your time, Sideways. Your horror-movie script is magic! Works!

I usually play wav files from terminal with 'play' command (from 'sox' package), but the script works with 'aplay' too.

For gcu the game calls to gcusound.sh, so I've done two scripts, gcusound.sh and playwave.sh with your entry.

However, this "script method" has a drawback: graphics are refreshed at the end of the sound, not at the beginning: I mean: when my @ open's a door, I can hear the sound but the door doesn't open until the sound is over, so the animations looks with delay.

Maybe you have another horror-movie instinct to fix this... Anyways, I'll do some research. Thanks again.