Nuclear powered audio ;)
More seriously, use _Atomic on a few fields that very obviously need it.
That is, channel's buffer pointer (used to signal to the mixer that the
channel is ready for use) and "flow control" flags (stop, done and
pause), and head and tail in the buffer itself. Since QF has been
working without _Atomic (admittedly, thanks to luck and x86's strong
memory model), this should do until proven otherwise. I imagine getting
stream reading out of the RT thread will highlight any issues.
Turned out the channels simply weren't being freed by SND_ScanChannels
when they should have been (probably a good thing, too, as it wasn't
being told to wait for the mixer).
Care needs to be taken when freeing channels as doing so while an
asynchronous mixer is using them is unlikely to end well. However,
whether the mixer is asynchronous depends on the output driver. This
lets the driver inform the rest of the system that the output and mixer
are running asynchronously.
SYS_dev is a holdover from when we had only the one flag and is not
meant to be used for tests (I seem to remember mentioning an audit was
necessary, but obviously forgotten). One step at a time, I guess :)
This improves the locality of reference when mixing and removes the
proxy sfx for streamed sounds.
The buffer for streamed sounds is allocated when the stream is opened
(since streamed sounds can't share buffers), and freed when the stream
is closed.
For block sounds, the buffer is reference counted (with the sfx holding
one reference, so currently block buffers never get freed), with their
reference count getting incremented on open and decremented on close.
That the reference counts get to 1 has been confirmed, so all that
should be needed is proper destruction of the sfx instances.
Still need to sort out just why channels leak across level changes.
They're currently treated as non-fatal, those sounds just won't ever
play. This allows ad_tears to at least load with only 32MB of locked
memory (it needs somewhere between 64 and 96).
Sounds no longer use the cache, which is good for multi-threaded, but a
pain for memory management: the buffers are shared between channels that
play back the sounds, but when the sounds were cached, they were
automagically (thus problematically) freed when the space was needed.
That no longer happens, so they leak. I think the solution is to use
reference counting and retain/release in sfx->open() and sfx->close().
Streams are the easy one as they were never in the cache. As a side
effect, sfxstream_t is much smaller as it no longer has the buffer
embedded in the struct.
SND_AllocChannel is a little too aggressive in freeing channels that
have finished as the channel may be externally owned (eg, by cd_file).
Get bgm looping working again.
More shrinkage. It turned out the mixer uses the phase fields, so they
couldn't be removed, but even at 192kHz, +/- 127 samples produces
sufficient phase separation for a 21cm head (which is, actually, pretty
big: mine is about 15cm across), but that change can come later.
The ambient sound loading has been removed from snd_channels because 1)
it doesn't work for nq, 2) it should never have been there in the first
place (it belongs in the client, but that needs some more API).
This is part of a process to shrink channel_t so it doesn't waste locked
memory when it gets moved there. Eventually, only the fields the mixer
needs will be in channel_t itself: those needed for spacialization will
be moved into a separate array.
In the process, I found that channels leak across level changes, but
this appears to be due to the cached sounds being removed during loading
and the mixer never marking them as done (it sees the null sfx pointer
and assumes the channel was never in use). Having the mixer mark the
channel as done seems to fix the leak, but cause a free channel list
overflow. Rather than fight with that, I'll leave the leak for now and
fix it at its root cause: the management of the sound samples
themselves.
The scaling up of the volumes when setting a channel's volume bothered
me. The biggest issue being it hasn't been necessary for over a decade
since the conversion to a float-mixer. Now the volume and attenuation
scaling from protocol bytes is entirely in the client's hands.
sfx_t is now private, and cd_file no longer accesses channel_t's
internals. This is necessary for hiding the code needed to make mixing
and channel management *properly* lock-free (I've been getting away with
murder thanks to x86's strong memory model and just plain luck with
gcc).
Sounds in Arcane Dimensions (at least those used by ad_tears) specify
start and end cue points. The code was using only the final point in the
list and thus breaking looped sounds. Now, the first cue point is used
as the loop start, and the second (if present), the sample length. Both
are bounds-checked against the wav's sample count. Fixes sound locking
up during the first seconds in ad_tears.
The misinterpretations were due to either the cvar not being accessed
directly by the engine, but via only the callback, or the cvars were
accesssed only by progs (in which case, they should be float). The
remainder are a potential enum (hud gravity) and a "too hard basket"
(rcon password: need to figure out how I want to handle secret strings).
This is an extremely extensive patch as it hits every cvar, and every
usage of the cvars. Cvars no longer store the value they control,
instead, they use a cexpr value object to reference the value and
specify the value's type (currently, a null type is used for strings).
Non-string cvars are passed through cexpr, allowing expressions in the
cvars' settings. Also, cvars have returned to an enhanced version of the
original (id quake) registration scheme.
As a minor benefit, relevant code having direct access to the
cvar-controlled variables is probably a slight optimization as it
removed a pointer dereference, and the variables can be located for data
locality.
The static cvar descriptors are made private as an additional safety
layer, though there's nothing stopping external modification via
Cvar_FindVar (which is needed for adding listeners).
While not used yet (partly due to working out the design), cvars can
have a validation function.
Registering a cvar allows a primary listener (and its data) to be
specified: it will always be called first when the cvar is modified. The
combination of proper listeners and direct access to the controlled
variable greatly simplifies the more complex cvar interactions as much
less null checking is required, and there's no need for one cvar's
callback to call another's.
nq-x11 is known to work at least well enough for the demos. More testing
will come.
I had forgotten to test with shared libs and it turns out jack and alsa
were directly accessing symbols in the renderer (and in jack's case,
linking in a duplicate of the renderer).
Fixes#16.
The JACK Audio Connection Kit support is now just an output target
rather than a full duplicate of the renderer (in pull mode). This is
what I wanted to to back when I first added jack support, but I needed
to get the renderer working asynchronously without affecting any of the
other outputs.
Fixes#16.
on_update is for pull-model outpput targets to do periodic synchronous
checks (eg, checking that the connection to the actual output device is
still alive and reviving it if necessary)
Output plugins can use either a push model (synchronous) or a pull
model (asynchronous). The ALSA plugin now uses the pull model. This
paves the way for making jack output a simple output plugin rather than
the combined render/output plugin it currently is (for #16) as now
snd_dma works with both models.
This brings the alsa driver in line with the jack render (progress
towards #16), but breaks most of the other drivers (for now: one step at
a time). The idea is that once the pull model is working for at least
one other target, the jack renderer can become just another target like
it should have been in the first place (but I needed to get the pull
model working first, then forgot about it).
Correct state checking is not done yet, but testsound does produce what
seems to be fairly good sound when it starts up correctly (part of the
state checking (or lack thereof), I imagine).
Still "some" more to go: a pile to do with transforms and temporary
entities, and a nasty one with host_cbuf. There's also all the static
block-alloc lists :/
It now takes a context pointer (opaque data) that holds the buffers it
uses for the temporary strings. If the context pointer is null, a static
context is used (making those uses of va NOT thread-safe). Most calls to
va use the static context, but all such calls have been formatted
consistently so they are easy to find when it comes time to do a full
audit.
There's still some cleanup to do, but everything seems to be working
nicely: `make -j` works, `make distcheck` passes. There is probably
plenty of bitrot in the package directories (RPM, debian), though.
The vc project files have been removed since those versions are way out
of date and quakeforge is pretty much dependent on gcc now anyway.
Most of the old Makefile.am files are now Makemodule.am. This should
allow for new Makefile.am files that allow local building (to be added
on an as-needed bases). The current remaining Makefile.am files are for
standalone sub-projects.a
The installable bins are currently built in the top-level build
directory. This may change if the clutter gets to be too much.
While this does make a noticeable difference in build times, the main
reason for the switch was to take care of the growing dependency issues:
now it's possible to build tools for code generation (eg, using qfcc and
ruamoko programs for code-gen).
They take a pointer to a free-list used for hashlinks so the hashlink
pools can be per-thread. However, hash tables that are not updated are
always thread-safe, so this affects only updates. progs_t has been set
up such that it is easy for multiple progs within one thread can share
hashlinks.