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[Wyvern]

Running on macOS 11.7.10.

Under some circumstances - triggering effect not yet pinned down - sound goes glitchy: music stops playing, and UI sound effects come from a random 'direction'; i.e., one UI click will sound just in the left ear, another will sound in just the right ear, a third will come from both like it ought to; volume also varies somewhat randomly.

I noticed this while playing through the tutorial, a bit after fighting the fleets guarding the jump gate (but before reporting my success at Ancyra); I am not certain that that's exactly when it started, however.

This effect persists through returning to the main screen. It does not persist through restarting the game entirely.

[Alex]

Hmm, very strange! The version of OpenAL hasn't changed, so the only thing that comes to mind is some kind of different interaction between it and Java 17.

Just to double-check: have you played the previous version on this same computer recently?

Edit: another thing comes to mind - this sounds like a way in which audio wiring can glitch out sometimes. I mean, I doubt that's it, but e.g. if you're putting on headphones to play and don't use them for anything else and the wiring in those is going bad... again, don't think that's it, but it seemed worth mentioning.

[Wyvern]

1: Have tested with 0.97; issue does not replicate with that version. (Edit: worth noting that this is using 0.97's base default java version, not updated at all.)
2: Had this happen a second time just now, during a battle & the recovery screen after the battle... and then it went back to normal when I returned to the campaign.
3: Fought another, smaller battle just after that, error did not replicate in that battle.

So it appears to be something that can intermittently occur during a battle, and may or may not persist after said battle.

[Thaago]

On a Mac running 14.6.1 (M series chips) and I am also having a few sound issues.

In battle, I sometimes get a strange buzzing noise: this will go away if I pause and unpause. I'm unable to reproduce it reliably so far.

[Wyvern]

Partially replicated issue just clicking around a bunch in ship refit; music still running, but the UI clicks are coming from random locations again.

May be related to overlapping sounds somehow? If I go slowly, click... click... click, then everything comes in properly centered. If I go fast, click-click-click, then the first click is fine, and the second click is fine, and then the third one comes in through just the left ear and the fourth one is just the right, and then the next one or two are fine... it's not perfectly deterministic, but that's the most common pattern I'm hearing.

[Wyvern]

Just got the strange buzzing noise (or at least a strange buzzing noise) myself; after battle with a pirate fleet, in the loot window, anything I do that would make UI noise (mouse over a cargo item or button, pick up or put down a cargo item) generates a buzz.

This was 100% replicable until I rapidly picked-up-and-put-down a cargo item; it buzzed for the first maybe five-to-seven clicks and then the buzzing stopped and didn't happen again. However, this isn't a fix: I'm now getting UI sounds coming in primarily through the left ear & at low volume (the pirate music is working properly in both ears the whole time); further rapid clicking results in the UI sounds occasionally coming in correctly through both ears & at proper volume. Maybe one time in five or so?

Closing out that window results in a return to the empty star system exploration music... also only in the left ear. Save-and-exit puts me back on the title screen with music still only in the left ear; UI sounds still glitching out as per above paragraph.

[Alex]

Could you try turning the music off to see if that makes a difference?

Edit: also, it may be worth trying to comment out various -XX: lines in starsector_mac.sh to see if that makes a difference. Some would cause the game to stop launching so it'd be a kind of trial and error process, though.

[Wyvern]

Using the (first) trimmed command line you suggested in this thread has not fixed the problem. Got through one battle with no audio errors! But after the second things started glitching out again, if perhaps a bit less dramatically?

Going to try no music + trimmed command line next. (Do I need to do anything more for 'no music' than just cranking music volume down to zero?)

[Alex]

Just setting the music volume to 0 should do it, yeah.

[Wyvern]

Turning music off seems to maybe help some, but I'm still getting occasional sound errors.

Edit: With additional testing, this includes both the offset-location sounds that I initially reported and the sound-replaced-with-buzzing that Thaago first noticed.

[Alex]

Thank you for trying it! ... are you able to run the windows version using Wine or whatever it is that lets you run windows apps on OS X? It would be interesting to see if the issues persist in that case, though honestly I'm not sure what it'd tell us one way or the other.

[Wyvern]

I don't have wine set up, no. Probably could get it set up, but it'd be a pain.

Perhaps more interesting would be seeing if the issue happens under 0.97 if I run that using java 17... but I'm not actually sure how to make that work, either.

[Alex]

Ah, no worries about trying Wine then!

Yeah, that would be interesting, but 0.97 wouldn't work with Java 17 out of the box, I don't think, it'd be quite a thing to try to make that work.

[Wyvern]

Hm. You mention that the version of OpenAL in use hasn't changed - is that something that I could reasonably try to update, and if so, how would I go about trying that?

[Alex]

There's openal.dylib in this folder:
Starsector.app\Contents\Resources\Java\native\macosx

That's the OpenAL library. I'm not actually sure where you'd get a more recent version of it - possibly from a more recent release of LWJGL? I'm not sure if there's even a newer version, though this one is >10 years old.