Sound Stops in Vista

[HaploVoss]

Greetings all. Long time player, first time poster

Anyway, I am u sed to playing Glest on my Ubuntu box and have never had any problems to speak of. Well now my main box is a Vista unit for various unfortunate remote e-commute / new job reasons.

Issue is this... Downloaded and grabbed the latest Glest just last Wed. Runs fantastic, never crashes at all - however a very odd thing happens around 95% of the time.

Any given game, regardless of map, multiplayer, who is playing what, etc. - at some point at random, the sound just quits. It doesn't start chopping, or repeating or anything like that, gameplay is as smooth as ever, and if you can stand to play in silence - it's no problemo. It stays that way forever until you restart entirely also... you cannot just go back to the menu and start a new game to kick-start the audio.

I currently play City of Heroes, Runes of Magic, Eternal Lands, and a bunch of twitch games, watch movies, etc. and have no sound issues at all, so I am confident in saying that it must be something to do with Glest and Vista fighting with each other somewhere.

This is on-board audio. Your basic VIA AC'97 chipset (yeah I know I know). Using a good old ATi Radeon 9600GT AGP card.

So I just wanted to ask here before I actually did a bug report. Thought maybe it might be some goofy Vista thing or maybe a patch or mod I could grab somewheres.

Thanks all and have a good one!
- Hap

[John.d.h]

Hmm... that's interesting.  I've been running Glest on Vista for a long time and never had this problem.  What version of Glest are you using?  How long does it usually take for the sound to cut out?  Does it happen after any particular event or combination of events?

[HaploVoss]

Running v3.2.2
It has never cut out on me before 5 minutes or so.
Usually it makes it about 3/4 of the way through a game before cutting out (which of course varies, so I don't know 10min, 15min?)

Whenever it does cut out, it always cuts out in the middle of a battle. I am uncertain but it seems like it might be associated with the deep 'throaty' attack 'yelp' of the blue battle mages.

It is just odd that it is not consistent. I can go through 3 battles with no problems, then get all ready to go, go sack the PC enemy group and be almost finished, and bang - no audio.

OR - it can be the very first battle, and bang - no audio, but the game plays perfectly fine no problems.

Just odd!

Thanks for the response!

Take care,
- Hap

[Omega]

Hmm, can you try some mods and tell us if the same thing occurs? It could be a weird thing in one of magitechs sound effects (you mentioned something about the battlemage?). Perhaps a bad byte or something that caused your sound card to act up, etc;

Other than that, I can't be certain, and replicating it would be nearly impossible for me.

[HaploVoss]

Yeah sure absotively. I should have thought to do that first my apologies.
Thanks for the point in the right direction.

I should be able to try that out at some point tomorrow evening and I will report back when I find something out!

Take care,
- Hap

[HaploVoss]

Just an update - sorry to have been so long to get back here... life and Christmas. lol

Ok I got it figured out. My speakers are fine, and so is my crappy on-board sound system. HOWEVER - there is a known issue with AC'97 audio chipsets and VISTA just cutting out in certain unknown scenarios.

Why in the world it is only happening under Glest, I have no idea. I did however go ahead and install Linux Mint as a baseline test, and when I run Glest under Mint, on this same machine, there are no audio problems at all.

So, what's the problem? Why.... Micro$oft! can you believe it?!

Thanks for all the input, etc. I have a regular question I'll pose in the forums.

Take care all,
- Hap