ETS2 1.38 Discussion

[Some newbie driver]

@Max, just by curiosity (and if you can answer it, ofc)

What you mean that is that the workload you sent to FMOD actually can be handled by different cores SIMULTANEOUSLY to your main loop that still has the mono-core restriction? Managing the sounds it plays while the main loop does other things?

Or just that the main loop has to wait the FMOD turn of doing things but at least those can use up to more than 1 core if necessary before returning the control to the main loop till the next time?

Regards

[xXCARL1992Xx]

FMod is not restricted by the game engines processing limitations but more like its own eco system that processes everything and then feeds the game, is what i get

[Max]

basic work of sound engine is to load data and send them into sound device in regular steps/chunks. as such, it must be asynchronous and independent.
game only says start to play this sound with that param. and fmod starts to work the sound until some change happen - sound ends (if not repeated), is changed by game or is forcefully stopped. any sound has its own buffer and could have own task that feeds it and handles all eventual filtering and mixing. the more complicated is bus linkage the more complicated is mixing but it is on fmods side (all data are set already). game does not need to care or control directly unless/until some another change is required.

[Some newbie driver]

So, as per your explanation Max (thanks for it), my guess about the CPU bottleneck be the problem when having too many sounds at the same time shouldn't be right (because it really doesn't take so many CPU to just tell FMOD "play that") and FMOD isn't restricted at all by the CPU limit on the main loop because it runs on its own (so we can call it an step further to the whole multi-core support then? compared with previous Open AL? Or that doesn't really changed?)

And then the problem would then be more a question of how FMOD works internally that can cause issues when lots of sounds, to find those practical limits and the better way to tune sounds up to that limit. Is that?

Regards

[cip]

I am still tempted to believe that it's nothing wrong neither with the game's engine, neither with FMOD but only a matter of priority set in the master track. SCS switched the truck sounds to highest priority while in 1.37 the template was on default (medium) priority. if truck engine sound modder did not realise this change, as more and more sounds appears it could happen that priority got an important role.
I also believe that it's nothing wrong with game's engine because previous FMOD, both games handled perfectly the truck sounds as well as my 1.000 traffic sounds, never felt like a sound is missing or cut and my CPU was an I7 4770 that time. after the issues encountered with Kriechbaum sound I unpacked his mod and identified small sized .wav files, less than 1 Mb and no more than 4 seconds, in total 64 sounds so professional work as always! I have tested another Kriechbaum sound meantime and had issues only with the engine brake sound, while everything else was working fine all the time. note that currently I have an I5 9600k CPU

[Some newbie driver]

If the priority parameter is just what its name says @cip, then it will just decide which sounds are played and which discarded if FMOD is struggling with its limits.

So yes, it could be a priority question what made sounds of truck engine to be cut on the video you show us. But if the priority would had been right for the truck, then other sounds would had been the ones cut off. It's just that the truck ones have our main focus and attention so it's a lot easier to notice when that happens. If the sounds cut would be of some of the random AI traffic, I doubt anyone of us could really follow the count of all the cars wandering around us (specially with your mod) and noticing if the sound of some of them goes away.

So, at the end, when they manage to give moders a clear answer to that you could tune better your mods to avoid that on the main sounds (probably masking well enough any playback problem). But the problem you noticed and Max mentions will still be there. My questions, pure curiosity as I said, were about to know the approach they will try to avoid the problem or at least identify when it happens so they can give guidelines of "do and don't" in the wiki. Because I agree you, I don't think it's something wrong with FMOD; but I'm sure that in some cases (like lots of buffers being played at the same time), it has to be done on an specific way to achieve good performance.

Regards

[cip]

absolutely, if a higher priority of the truck engine sounds is set, obviously I would expect that sounds will be cut from somewhere else like bird songs, other environmental noise, then few of the Ai sounds which at high density will be surely unnoticed I won't mind this if indeed we speak about a game/FMOD limitation but if this is only the result of wrong sounds FMOD implementation, I would like to know what is the cause and if it comes from our sound mods for which we did not have clear guidance, we can solve it if SCS will guide us.
since this do not seem to be a singular case and EVR sounds suffered a similar issue according to Dark Captain, and without my sounds (because I did not release anything yet for ETS2), the problem could come simply from wrong FMOD settings. I remind that I haven't noticed any issues in ATS

[JD6]

I noticed Steam is always using a "Validating" message next to the game's name. Is it an ETS2 thing or my Steam acting up?

[supersobes]

I've noticed that Steam does that with some of the non-SCS games in library as well. It seems that it's a new Steam thing as I don't recall seeing it before the most recent Steam update occured.

[Mohegan13]

I've never seen it for any game yet.