Greetings, As many of you probably know or noticed, the viewer UI sounds are currently sound assets that the viewer must retrieve from the asset server and then decode into a temporary *.dsf file before being able to use them.
This poses a number of issues: - There is a significant delay between the time the viewer is started and the time when the asset gets preloaded in the VFS cache: this time is the minimum delay before an UI sound can be used after the viewer is connected when it was not kept in the saved VFS after the last session (which often happens when the VFS gets shrunk down). - Even once in the VFS, there is a delay between the time an UI event is triggered for the first time in the session, and the time when the corresponding UI sound is played: this delay corresponds to the decode time (the time needed to extract and decode the data from the VFS, and to write it down as a *.dsf file in the disk cache). - Should the asset server be too busy, the sound may fail to get retreived and the corresponding UI event will not have a sound for the full viewer session. - When running two viewer sessions and you close one viewer, the decoded *.dsf files get erased, and the UI sounds stop playing in the remaining session (this bug is however fixed in some TPVs, among which the Cool VL Viewer). - The UI sounds cannot be played before the viewer is connected to the grid. - While the UI is constant from one grid to another (either in SL or OpenSim), the UI sounds are not (OpenSim sounds are especially lame, IMO), and since they however share the same UUID, when switching back to another grid, you may get a mix of the two grids UI sounds (depending on what sounds were kept in the saved VFS cache). - The UI sounds get stored many times: once in the live VFS (in RAM), once in the saved VFS (most of the times) on the hard disk, once as a decoded sound file (*.dsf), still on the hard disk, once as a buffered decoded data (in RAM, after the sound has been played once)... Lame (two storage spaces: on disk and in RAM should be more than enough for such sounds) ! These issues could easily be solved (I got a patch ready), provided the UI sounds could be distributed as part of the default skin (for example in /skins/default/sounds)... To do this however, we'd need to know what is the license status of the UI sounds: does LL allow TPV developpers to distribute them (under the Artistic License, for example, like for the UI artwork), and if yes under which License ? Thanks in advance. Henri. _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
