Enemy Engaged: Comanche vs Hokum - crashes on game start

[WinterSnowfall]

Easy steps to reproduce: start the game and pick Combat -> Demo. The game will get to a point where it mentions: 0164:err:dsound:Buffer::setLocation Out of software sources and very shortly crashes.

Here are the full logs: cohokum.log

Needless to say, everything works just fine with native/Wine dsound.

[mirh]

I remember number of sources was a hot topic in #28 and #59

[WinterSnowfall]

@mirh Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I had to bump the number of sources quite a lot before the game started working poperly, namely to 4096. If DirectSound was designed anything like Direct3D, perhaps the defaults for software sources should be bumped quite beyond those for hardware sources. Not entirely sure what dsound/drivers exposed back in the day though.

[kcat]

DSOAL currently allows creating up to 896 software buffers by default. It requests 1024 sources from OpenAL, and from whatever it gets back, reserves 128 of them for hardware buffers leaving the rest for software. You can actually use the sources config option in alsoft.ini to force more

If I were to guess, DSound allows a virtually infinite number of software buffers, while OpenAL gives you a certain number (which you can request, but what you get is what you get). As far as OpenAL Soft is concerned, it has sufficiently separated sources from mixing such that the mixer is only affected by the number of playing sources, rather than the number of allocated sources. Though there are a couple places where the number of allocated sources is relevant, like when committing EAX properties (it has to go through all allocated sources to see which have deferred EAX changes that need to be committed to active/immediate state) or when certain fxslot properties change (which can effect how sources compute internal parameters).

[WinterSnowfall]

DSOAL currently allows creating up to 896 software buffers by default. It requests 1024 sources from OpenAL, and from whatever it gets back, reserves 128 of them for hardware buffers leaving the rest for software. You can actually use the sources config option in alsoft.ini to force more

I have bumped them up via config options, as stated above, and that has indeed resolved it, but some games apparently take issue with the current default. I've seen the same error pop up in other situations as well, such as with Mortal Kombat 4, however it seems to take it rather well and not crash (some sound effects get skipped at times though).

[kcat]

Presuming DSound does allow virtually unlimited software buffers, one potential option is to delay retrieving an OpenAL source for one until playback. Similar to how LOCDEFER buffers are handled, except it can only be set to use "software" instead of either. Along with taking back sources after they've finished playing, that would ease the amount of sources OpenAL needs to manage for thousands of non-playing buffers. DSOAL could then request INT_MAX sources from OpenAL just in case, and not worry about using more resources than the app actually tries to use.