multiple sounds

[xdan]

Hi there!

Could you tell me, is it possible to play multiple sounds at the same time? E.g. mp3 music along with wav sfx.

(from my tests, it seems not! But I am only just starting, so may have done something wrong)

[Adam Schmelzle]

Yes, but it depends on your device. Some phones will allow you to play one wave, and one midi at the same time. Some will only allow 1 of any type, and others will allow several of any type. There's very little consistency among devices.

So your best option is to play a .midi file with your .wav sfx. That's the most common combination I found for doing multiple sounds at once, but even then it sounds a bit wacky on one of my devices. Sound support is so annoying on J2ME devices that I have almost given up on it. I only use sound for music tracks in .midi now.

Maybe devices will start getting better sound support, who knows. I haven't tested multi-sound on my new phones yet, so I can't say for sure about the latest devices.

Good luck.

[xdan]

Ah ok then. I might just abandon sfx in favour of a nice music loop.
Thanks!

[Adam Schmelzle]

Yeah... I remember when I was starting out, and started working on an engine for playing multiple sfx at the same time, but then discovered that it never really works right. That was probably the most disappointing thing about mobile development that I had to put up with. You get used to the lack of sounds after a while, and if you play a bunch of so called 'AAA' titles, you'll notice that they usually only have a music track as well. If a game has sfx, it's one at a time.

It doesn't bother me so much anymore because I realized that I always turn off the sound when playing a game anyway, and it turns out that's what most people do.

I read a rant by some ignorant mobile game reviewer once where the guy was pregnant doging about how developers are too lazy and never put any effort into sound support. It's not our fault

[xdan]

Hmm, now I've changed my mind and am just having sfx

Is wav the best supported format? At the moment I'm using it (PCM, mono 8-bit 8kHz). I thought I read somewhere that at least this format was required if a phone does support playing sounds, but I can't seem to find where I read that any more to confirm this.

Someone who tested the game did not have sound working, but wav doesn't seem to be listed in their phone's specs (http://wap.samsungmobile.com/uaprof/u600_10.xml). However other formats like mp3 and aac are. Hmm!

Other than that, I've pretty much finished my first *attempt* at a game, woohoo Just waiting to see if grey stripe will activate my account...

[Adam Schmelzle]

Sound support really is frustrating. The only format I've seen widely supported is midi. Only really useful for music though.

I think you'll be able to cover sfx on most devices if you support amr and wav. AMR is significantly better on the filesizes/bandwidth, which is why it's been adopted as a standard. Most devices support amr these days, and wav's take up a ton of space.

What type of game have you made? How long have you been waiting for greystripe to give you a login?

[xdan]

It's only a small and somewhat silly one button game. Just really as a test to see what happens.

I applied to greystripe only a couple of days ago, I'm just impatient.

Thanks for the advice!

[Adam Schmelzle]

Greystripe can be a bit slow with their e-mail replies. Don't knock silly one button games, they can take over the world. I think my flower games were the reason they removed the 'top 10' from the gamejump.com website.

[xdan]

Haha cool My game's a port of this which I made a while back. I actually do love simple games myself, and prefer silly and surreal over complex gameplay. So I'm trying out mobile dev to see if such a market exists there!