Two items from listening-gate round 2.
Mute: AcdreamToggleAudioMute (default Ctrl+M; bare M is selection) flips
OpenAlAudioEngine.Muted, implemented as the AL LISTENER gain - unused
since A2 moved all mixing to the CPU, so it is a free master switch that
silences already-playing voices instantly and restores them exactly,
without touching the retail mixing math, the -50 dB allocation cutoff, or
any persisted volume setting. Rebindable like every other action; console
line confirms each flip.
Inn chatter: the user hears talk-and-laughter ambience in retail inns and
not in acdream. Three installed-dat scans (pinned as conformance tests in
EnvCellSoundEmitterInventoryTests) prove the mechanism is NOT client
data: no interior static in the town landblock carries an ambient-slot
sound table, no Setup among all 5,935 in the portal dat references one,
and yet 23 sound tables carrying ONLY Ambient1..8 slots exist - pure
soundscape banks with nothing client-side pointing at them. They are
wire-bound: the server attaches one to an emitter object via
CreateObject's sound-table field and fires the slots over 0xF750 - ACE
implements exactly this (EmoteType.Sound heartbeat emotes ->
GameMessageSound broadcast). Our 0xF750 receiver (slice A3) is live and
now instrumented (ACDREAM_PROBE_SOUND_WIRE=1, via the new
AudioDiagnostics owner per Code Structure Rule 5, with per-event drop
reasons in AudioHookSink.PlayServerSound). A probed session against the
local ACE received ZERO 0xF750 events across a town walkabout: the
silence is server world-content (no emitters configured/firing), not a
client drop. The first scan's assertion originally encoded the
emitter-object hypothesis; the data refuted it, and the test now pins the
negative so the conclusion cannot silently rot.
Full Release suite green (the one failure during development was the
hypothesis-pinning assertion, corrected to pin the finding).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Slice A4 hung UI_EnterPortal on TeleportAnimEvent.EnterTunnel — the first
tunnel-family frame — so the cue landed a whole TunnelFadeIn after retail
plays it. Retail's site is gmSmartBoxUI::BeginTeleportAnimation
@0x004D638E, i.e. Begin(), which the sequencer already marks as
TeleportAnimEvent.PlayEnterSound.
That event has existed since the R6 portal-space work, complete with a
'Begin(): sound_ui_enter_portal' comment, and no consumer has ever
handled it — the switch in LocalPlayerTeleportController had cases for
Place, EnterTunnel, PlayExitSound and FireLoginComplete only, so the
sequencer emitted PlayEnterSound into nothing. A4 filled the gap in the
wrong place rather than filling it.
Both cues now go through named presentation methods driven by the
matching events: PlayEnterCue on PlayEnterSound, PlayExitCue on
PlayExitSound (the TunnelFadeOut -> WorldFadeIn edge, @0x004D7405, the
same tick the world viewport is revealed). EnterTunnel/ExitTunnel are
visuals again. The exit cue was already firing at the right moment, since
ExitTunnel was called from inside the PlayExitSound case — correct by
accident, explicit now.
Found by the user asking when the recall cues play.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
E.2 described the audio engine as a retail-faithful 3D pool with
quieter-slot eviction and probability-weighted variant picking. Campaign
A disproved all three: retail creates every gameplay buffer 2D, evicts on
DAT priority rather than gain, and treats probability as a Bernoulli
silence gate — the 'weighted picking' was the bug that made creature
chatter fire ~20x too often.
Also fixes the A6 ledger SHA, which was stamped pre-amend.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Retail EoR has no music system: the linked winmm MIDI player has zero
callers, 'music' appears zero times in the 65 MB decomp, SoundType has no
music member, InitPrefs registers no music key, and the install ships no
music files. So PlayMusic/StopMusic/MusicVolume and the AudioSettings
Music knob are deleted rather than left as an API modelling dead code —
the string-keyed signature was the tell, since every other entry point is
DID-keyed. Old settings.json files carrying a 'music' key still load; the
reader ignores unknown keys and the next save drops it.
The Ambient slider is now surfaced, because slice A5 gave it something to
drive, and its default returns to retail's 1.0 from an invented 0.8 —
InitPrefs defaults every sound preference to unity. The panel rule is
unchanged: no slider that does nothing.
r05-audio-sound.md gets a SUPERSEDED banner naming its five wrong
sections (falloff, pan, voice pool, selection, music, ambient) so a
future reader reaches the lane notes instead of the Ghidra-era reads that
this campaign spent its first two slices undoing.
TS-9 re-scoped from 'any MP3 cue' to the measured blast radius: exactly 1
MP3 among 786 shipped waves, a ~2 s mono clip. Its original framing
assumed a music system that does not exist. The ADPCM count remains
unmeasured and is named as the open question.
Deferred deliberately: #321's sound-cache decode-dedup race. It is a
pre-existing concurrency flake rather than audio-parity behaviour, and
shipping a speculative fix to a race I have not reproduced is exactly the
shortcut this project's no-workarounds rule exists to prevent.
Campaign A is code-complete; the plan carries the closeout.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
acdream had no ambient system: StartAmbient minted a handle and played
nothing. Retail's is a weighted-accumulation + timer-queue engine, not
looping voices. On every objcell change (24 m) CellManager::ChangePosition
rebuilds per-sound weights over the 3x3 landblock ring x 64 land cells
each, decoding each cell's terrain word through the region file's
terrain -> scene -> AmbientSTBDesc chain; playback is a min-heap of
absolute deadlines drained from the frame tick, where each pop fires a
one-shot and re-arms.
A continuous bed (base_chance == 0) is non-positional, crossfaded by its
share of the TOTAL weight, and re-fired every min_rate seconds — that
rate is the author's intended loop period, and re-firing is how retail
fakes a sustained bed with no looping voice, re-rolling the variant and
the crossfade each time. An intermittent one keeps its authored volume,
plays at a random accumulated compass bearing at min + (max-min)*t^2,
and is dice-gated. Indoors is silent by design: CEnvCell's contributor is
a folded ret and EnvCell carries no sound data.
The Opus review caught four bugs before this landed, one fatal:
- Cell offsets were built in ABSOLUTE world coordinates and differenced
against the listener's STREAMED-frame position, so every one of 576
offsets came out ~32 km, every contribution was culled, and the whole
feature was silent with nothing logged. Offsets are now landblock-local
the way Position::get_offset builds them, and the streamed-frame
position is carried separately for playback, where it belongs.
- The cell's weight was added to the shared denominator once per
DESCRIPTOR instead of once per CELL, dividing every bed's crossfade by
the table's entry count — enough to push a typical authored volume
under the 0.03 audibility floor.
- The drain used where retail's UseTime is strictly
below, so a descriptor authored with a zero rate re-armed at the same
instant and spun the frame forever.
- Arming only enqueued; retail's UpdatePlayQueue PLAYS and then re-arms,
so a newly audible ambient was silent for a full period after the
crossing that made it audible.
Also: beds now go through retail's single 16-voice priority pool rather
than acdream's UI pool (retail has one pool; parking beds in the UI pool
let an A4 portal cue chop one mid-wave and discarded the authored
priority), and CalcDir's in-block test is XY-only, since CalcWeight
includes Z on purpose and CalcDir excludes it on purpose.
Two behaviours are knowingly incomplete and registered rather than
guessed at slice end: TS-66 (sky-lit interiors should keep the outdoor
set) and TS-67 (contribution weight is computed in-plane). Retires TS-29.
The frame-loop hook is a typed IAmbientFramePhase, not a callback — the
first attempt used an Action<float> and the architecture guard
ExtractedUpdateOwners_DoNotRetainAnonymousCallbacks correctly rejected it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Retail's UI sound bank was absent, so three families of cue were silent:
the portal enter/exit stingers, the AdminEnvirons dungeon atmosphere
(chanting, drums, whispers, thunder — what players remember as dungeon
'music'), and every other interface slot.
The bank's DID is not a literal anywhere in retail: GetUISoundTable
@0x00563FB0 asks GetByEnum for enum slot 7, and DBCache::GetDIDFromEnum
@0x00413940 resolves it through two EnumIDMap hops off the portal dat
header's master map. UiSoundTableResolver walks that chain the way
RetailCursorResolver already walks it for cursors. Against the shipped
dats it resolves to 0x2000004B, and that table holds exactly the 32 UI_*
slots (UI_EnterPortal 0x6A .. UI_Thunder6 0x8A) — content that confirms
the walk independently of the decode. UiSoundTableResolutionTests pins
the walk, the DID, and the content, and skips when dats are absent.
Two corrections to the research along the way. The lane-5 note recorded
GetByEnum's arguments transposed: the 0x22 it called a fileType is the
CACHE type (CLOCache(cache, CSoundTable::Allocator, 0x22)) and the real
second-hop key is 0x10000003; walking it the other way finds nothing. And
its claim that the interface volume pref applies is wrong — GetAttenuation
with ambient=0 multiplies by the EFFECT knob, so retail's
interface_sound_volume stays the dead knob lane 1 byte-decoded it to be.
EnvironSoundCueMap is an explicit 21-case table read straight out of
Handle_Admin__Environs @0x0055DE20, not arithmetic: codes 0x65..0x72 sit
0x11 below their SoundType, but 0x73/0x74 have no case, so 0x75 lands on
UI_Squeal (0x84) where an offset gives 0x86, and the switch ends at 0x7B
with no 0x7C case. Verified case-by-case against the decomp rather than
from the lane note, whose tail table was ambiguous.
Cues are attached where retail plays them: the teleport-animation
boundary for the portal pair, and the AdminEnvirons handler for the
stingers. PlaySoundFromCenter's pan-0 / distance-0 shape is what
PlayUiWave already implements after A2.
Retires TS-54. Narrows AP-115 to its notice-presentation residual.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
acdream never parsed retail's Sound event, so every server-driven cue was
silent: melee hits and wounds, wield/unwield, pickup/drop, lockpicking,
lifestone bind, spell resist, trap triggers, item mana depletion.
SoundEvent parses the 16-byte message (guid, SoundType, f32 volume) whose
layout three oracles agree on: retail CM_Physics::DispatchSB_SoundEvent
@0x006AC760 reading buf+4/+8/+0xC, ACE's GameMessageSound at declared
length 16, and holtburger's PlaySoundData.
Playback reuses EntityEffectController's existing per-guid queue rather
than adding a second one, because retail routes sounds through the SAME
CObjectMaint blob queue as F754/F755: an event for a guid the client does
not know yet is parked and drained by HandleCreateObject, so a creature
that spawns and immediately grunts still grunts. Dropping it — the
obvious alternative — would silently lose the cue. Sound joins Direct and
Typed as a third PendingEffect kind so one readiness edge releases the
whole mixed stream in order.
AudioHookSink.PlayServerSound reproduces two decoded asymmetries with the
animation-hook path: the sound plays at the WIRE volume and the
SoundTable entry's volume is ignored (the hook path does the opposite),
while the entry's probability still gates it and its priority still
drives eviction. An object with no SoundTable plays nothing, matching
CPhysicsObj::play_sound @0x0050F460's early return.
The no-window host parses and discards, exactly as it does for F754/F755
— sound is presentation.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Retail is not a 3D audio engine. Every gameplay buffer is created with
m_3D = 0 and the DirectSound 3D listener the client sets up is dead code;
spatialization is two CPU scalars per voice, frozen at emission. This
slice ports that math and demotes OpenAL to a voice bank.
RetailSoundMixer (new, Core) carries the byte-decoded curve from
SoundManager::GetAttenuation @0x00550020: g = dist < 5 ? vol : 25*vol/d2,
clamped to 1 BEFORE the single master multiply, db = ceil(20*log10 g),
with a hard -50 dB floor at which retail does not start the voice at all
(audible radius ~94.2 m at unity). Pan is PlaySoundInternal @0x00550170's
(int)(-15*sin(delta-bearing)) in whole decibels, truncating toward zero,
forced to dead centre when (int)distance < 5, with no front/back and no
elevation cue. Every AL source is now source-relative with rolloff 0 and
the global distance model is None: AL's InverseDistanceClamped was
first-power (2/d), quieter than retail up close and far louder at range
with no cutoff whatsoever. That was the largest audible divergence in the
subsystem (AP-28, retired here).
RetailVoicePool (new, Core) ports the allocator at 0x0054FEC0: ring scan
for a free or finished slot, then evict the first slot whose DAT priority
is strictly lower, else drop. Eviction compared GAIN before, so a loud
unimportant sound could silence a quiet important one. It lives in Core
because the engine's play path talks to native AL handles and could not
be tested; the pool now has 12 conformance tests.
The listener keeps using the camera position, which the decode shows is
retail-faithful (SmartBox::set_viewer @0x00452D36 hands the same collided
camera Position to SoundManager) — only the heading extraction changes,
since retail reads one compass bearing and never a forward/up basis. An
earlier draft of the plan called this a defect; corrected in the plan so
it is not fixed backwards.
Opus review found and this commit fixes: a linear pan-to-azimuth mapping
that saturated to full separation at 30 degrees (OpenAL Soft's own
speaker angle) where retail gives 15 dB — now inverts the constant-power
pan law, so full deflection reaches 0.776 of the arc and both channels
stay live; the stale FUN_00550ad0 / gain-eviction class header, which
contradicted the register row this commit writes; missing discriminating
tests for clamp order and pan truncation; dead PlayingGain state whose
comment invented a retail symbol; and a third in-tree copy of
Position::heading, now delegating to MoveToMath.PositionHeading.
MasterVolume folds into the mixer's one multiply instead of AL listener
gain, so the cutoff, radius and dB quantisation move with the slider.
Register: AP-28 retired; AP-173 (pan law), AP-174 (volume taxonomy),
TS-64 (two unimplemented sound prefs), TS-65 (volume-squared quirk,
applied on the ambient path only) filed. Research note corrected twice
where its summary contradicted its own decode (30 m dB, floor vs trunc).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The SoundTable probability field is a Bernoulli play/skip gate applied at
the play site (SoundManager::PlayProbability @0x005500E0), not a selection
weight — and variant selection (SoundManager::GetSound @0x00550680) is a
uniform index over (n-1) that ignores probability entirely. SoundCookbook
did the opposite: a cumulative-distribution walk weighted BY probability,
short-circuiting single-entry lists before rolling at all.
A dat census says 4,183 of 4,184 entries are single-entry and 686 of those
carry probability < 1.0, so the gate was categorically absent: Speak1 idle
chatter authored at 0.05 fired every trigger (~20x too often), wound/attack/
swoosh variants never dropped, and six 0.0001 entries always played.
Split into retail's two steps (PickVariant + PlayProbability, composed by
Select) over a new ISoundRandom modelling both retail roll ranges: the
variant roll clamped below 1.0 (0x00797D48) and the gate's 1/32767 grid,
which is why 0.0001 resolves to ~1.2e-4. PickVariant reproduces retail's
(n-1) off-by-one verbatim per the port-faithfully rule — the last variant
of a multi-entry sound is unreachable, costing exactly one wave
(0x0A00051E) in the shipped dats.
Also removes invented mechanism this review disproved: the dead Core
SoundEntry/ISoundCache scaffold (PitchMin/PitchMax, Loop, Is3D — retail
never calls SetFrequency, never sets the loop flag, and creates every
gameplay buffer 2D), the engine's pitch plumbing, the int 0..7 priority
cast (the dat field is a float in [0,1]; 4,100 entries collapsed to 0),
and the clamp-at-the-field on volume (an unbounded gain retail clamps only
after the distance divide).
Tests rewritten as conformance against the disassembled values, replacing
a self-referential suite that pinned the wrong model.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Full review of the audio subsystem against the named 2013 retail decomp,
with byte-verification of every load-bearing float compare (five BN
polarity/constant elisions caught). Headlines: retail is a CPU-side 2D
pan+gain engine (no 3D listener in use); the SoundTable probability field
is a Bernoulli SILENCE gate our SoundCookbook never applies (4,183/4,184
entries are single-entry and we short-circuit them); 0xF750 server sounds
are entirely unhandled; ambients are region-authored weighted one-shots
(indoors silent by design); and retail EoR has NO music system at all.
Plan proposes slices A1-A6; awaiting user go.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
