Quake3 sound issues

BradB · Posted: Thu Aug 15, 2002 9:56 pm Post subject: Quake3 sound issues

I know from searching the forums & net that this has been done almost to death. However, nobody seams to have exactly my problem (or perhaps my searching skills are poor). Anyhow, I recently installed Q3A for Gentoo & was very pleasantly surprised that it worked very well out of the emerge, except for sound. I run alsa drivers on a VIA mobo AC97 (via686 chipset) I also run KDE. Using

Pigeon · Guru Joined: 21 Jun 2002 Posts: 307

What happens when you use a wm other than KDE? Try one without a sound daemon like blackbox, or even plain ol' twm. (I usually run q3 from twm- better performance)

The "alsasound stop; modprobe xxx" works because (I think) it forcibly kills arts (kde sound daemon) or at least shuts it off for a while. Arts' job is to mix all the sound streams together so you can use more than one sound-producing application at once. However, if your CPU usage is maxxed out like it is while playing quake3, arts doesn't get the CPU time it needs to mix all that together, and lags. At least, I think.

As for fixing it for use in kde, you could probably renice arts to a higher priority, which might slow down your computer a lot should arts wigg out on you, or you can run quake3 at a lowered priority, which may result in choppy gameplay. I'm not familiar with arts and kde in general, so I can't help you with option 1. A total shot in the dark would be 'ps -A|grep arts' and renice anything that comes up to a higher priority. For option 2, just do 'artsdsp -m nice quake3'.

BradB · Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2002 2:07 am Post subject:

Good points. I tried running Quake via plain xdm - can't remember the results, I'll have to try that again.

Brad

tux-fan · Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2002 8:20 am Post subject:

Have had that sound problem too. I solved it by not loading the artsd. U can disable the artsd in KDE's control center.

Russki · Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2002 1:30 pm Post subject:

Just a tip:
Sometimes, quake3 (and it's mods) have sound problems when you have esd+artsd running.
Check if you have esd running and kill it.

I never had ARTS in KDE enabled. ALSA did everything perfect.
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xurf · n00b Joined: 10 Feb 2003 Posts: 12 Location: Reading, UK

I had exaclty the same problem with arts/kde3.1/quake3 - a delay of 1-2 secs with 'artsdsp -m quake3', or a hang on startup without. Many thanks to Pigeon as

artsdsp -m nice quake3

works a treat.

Predator · n00b Joined: 04 Jun 2002 Posts: 9 Location: Leipzig

Is there a possibility to run xmms and q3a at the same time?
w/ Gnome w/o esd !

When XMMS is running and I start q3a - loading stops at q3a sound initializing...

I think it's because /dev/dsp is in use, but there must be a way...

thanks

Uranus · Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2003 10:24 pm Post subject:

I have xmms using /dev/adsp and quake3 using normal /dev/dsp

Predator · n00b Joined: 04 Jun 2002 Posts: 9 Location: Leipzig

/dev/dsp is my only output device !

ess solo1 - alsa 0.90

it's not possible, is it :cry: