How to have a good SoundEngine?

There's a setting on the properties of the application called 'multi channel sounds' (or something similar) that stops sounds interrupting one another, I think.

Sorry I can't get the exact name of the setting right now I'm not at my computer.

The problem is that you're specifically only using one channel. You can only play one sound per channel. But Channel 1 and Channel 2 can both play at the same time, etc.

If you select the simple choice of playing a sample fusion will select the nearest free channel to play the sound (in theory), or you can manually select which sounds gets played in what which is prefered because then you can control volume of certain samples easier. I personally use ranges, e.g. 30-32 is for music, 1-10 for player sounds and the rest is for whatever.

A tip: Try using OGG even for samples. WAVs have awful sizes and the difference between WAV and OGG-compressed samples is so minimal that it's unhearable to most people with regular, cheap speakers or headphones. I know that in short samples it may not seem like much, but it adds up.

Another tip would be to avoid MIDIs in CF like a plague. The bug I'm about to describe happened even back in TGF 1.x times, maybe even earlier, I don't know since I never had KNP or CNC and it makes it unable to change music (if using MIDI) after you set one at the start of frame. This hurts especially when you need/want separate boss music where bosses are within level, without any separate arenas that could be put in separate frames. When you try to change MIDI music by just playing another once certain condition was met, the framerate goes bye-bye and you're left with a PowerPoint presentation instead of a game. That's why it's so great that you can use per channel playback as the bug I've mentioned happens only when using MIDIs, not regular audio files. And seriously, who wants to listen to MIDIs nowadays anyway? I seriously wonder why Microsoft didn't get rid of software synthesizer for MIDIs a long time ago. Maybe someone there just likes Canyon.mid that much, lol.

If you want to make game that's small in size (but also has cool music in it), and chiptunes suit your game and you aren't afraid of using weird music software, you should consider using pxtone or klystrack to make music for your game as they have small file sizes, comparable with MIDIs, but are also very good sounding thanks to advanced synthesis. Then use appropriate object. BTW. You may thank me for the klystrack object as I've commissioned it from [MENTION=9754]Phi[/MENTION].

I mean, MIDI is ancient in the world of computers, but it still generates a tiny, tiny file. That's got something going for it. Not all MIDI is bad.

One trick I used in Mondrian was to create an object that would control channels. Essentially, I planned out which sound effects would play on which channels, and using alterable values, incremented the channel number on which a particular sound effect would play. After the sound effect ended, I would then subtract 1 from that particular alterable value, so the next time the effect played, it would be on an open channel.

Quote from wererabbit

I mean, MIDI is ancient in the world of computers, but it still generates a tiny, tiny file. That's got something going for it. Not all MIDI is bad.

True, but because of the bug in the CF I've mentioned if you are going to change music mid-level, e.g. for a boss fight, the performance will go down the crapper. And Klystrack and pxtone generate very small files as well, because they use sound synthesis for the most part.

Surely that is fixable. As long as your midi file has good note-off values, it should just swap over. Have you submitted a bug report?

That bug existed since tgf 1.0. It's pretty fair to assume they know about 20+ yo bug.

Quote from wererabbit

I mean, MIDI is ancient in the world of computers, but it still generates a tiny, tiny file. That's got something going for it. Not all MIDI is bad.

I wouldn't recommend it. I tried to use midis in a game recently and I found that there was no way, even on an OS level, to control the volume of MIDI playback once you get to Windows 7 and up. I mean, there are probably ways but certainly not ones you can access in CTF. I ended up having to convert all of the midis to wav files.