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r05-audio-sound.md gets a SUPERSEDED banner naming its five wrong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 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>
SoundId was not a subset of retail's table, the way its comment claimed.
It was an invention: 23 acdream-local names on acdream-local values, and
the values were wrong in the way that matters. FootstepDefault = 0x02 is
retail's Random. SwingSword = 0x10 is retail's Death2. Death = 0x60 is
retail's Explode. Anyone who reached for one of those names to compare
against a wire or dat value would have got a different sound.
Nothing referenced any of them by name -- grep for `SoundId.` across src
and tests returns nothing -- so this was a trap rather than a live defect,
the same shape the enum campaign found in DamageType. All 22 invented names
are deleted and retail's 205 replace them.
Three oracles agree exactly, on every name and every value: retail
acclient.h:4569 enum SoundType, ACE's Sound, and DatReaderWriter's Sound.
The third matters most. AudioHookSink already resolves SoundTable lookups
through DatReaderWriter.Enums.Sound, so that is the enum acdream actually
reads at runtime; our catalog now agrees with the values already flowing
through the dat path, and a conformance test pins the two so they cannot
drift apart.
On the "206 sounds" figure: retail's block holds 207 entries, being 205
sounds followed by NUM_SOUND_TYPES = 0xCD and FORCE_SoundType_32_BIT. The
first is a count and the second a width pin. Counting the former is where
206 came from. Neither is a member here, matching how the campaign treated
NUM_ATTACK_HEIGHTS and Num_HoldKeys -- a count is not a value the wire can
carry.
Behaviour is unchanged and could not be otherwise: the enum had no
consumers. IAudioEngine's three SoundId overloads are no-op stubs and the
live path takes wave ids and DatReaderWriter values.
The user's separate report that sound is "not working that good" is a
triggering, selection and attenuation question rather than a catalog one,
and is filed as its own Bucket B row in the post-Vulkan intake.
Also in this commit, by user decision: AC2D is retired as a reference. Its
clone and directory are gone and it must not be re-cloned. Everything we
took from it still stands and is written down -- the FSplitNESW terrain
split constants, the 0xF61C movement packet layout, the finding that a
client need not compute terrain Z itself -- so CLAUDE.md's reference list,
its hierarchy table, and the architecture doc's protocol row now point at
docs/research/2026-04-12-movement-deep-dive.md rather than erasing the
history. The reference count drops from six to five.
Core tests 3907 passed / 2 skipped.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Erik