Inside Scoop on Guild Wars Sound

Hi, there,

I wanted to post up a thread on in-game sound. Jim, the programmer who works most closely with sound issues, took the time to write up this interesting information on game sound. Give it a read if you have an interest, and we will watch for questions, if any arise.

There has been some question about what the sound quality slider actually does. To clarify, here is what happens at each setting, with level one indicating the leftmost position and five indicating the rightmost position:

• Level one – DirectSound software mixing, minimum number of mixing channels.
• Level two – DirectSound software mixing, reduced number of mixing channels.
• Level three – DirectSound software mixing, standard number of mixing channels.
• Level four – DirectSound hardware mixing (if supported by hardware), increased number of mixing channels.
• Level five – DirectSound hardware mixing (if supported by hardware), EAX (if supported by hardware), maximum number of mixing channels

Generally speaking, levels four and five (hardware acceleration modes) are meant for those with mid-to-high-end audio cards with good, stable support for accelerated audio. Instability or poor-quality output in audio hardware acceleration mode can occur due to driver conflicts and/or system configuration issues. If you are having problems at the higher quality settings, turn the quality slider down until your system stabilizes. Note that you will have to restart the game in order to re-initialize the sound at the new level if switching between EAX and non-EAX modes. New drivers are a logical place to start if you are having any problems. If issues still persist, you may have a hardware conflict between your sound card and other devices. NCSoft’s support page has information on how to solve some of these conflicts.

We are aware that a small number of users are experiencing a severe performance issue that is related to audio playback, and are continuing to investigate these cases. In the meantime, if you have not done so, please contact NCSOFT support and make sure they get a complete profile of your hardware and the symptoms you are experiencing. This may help us to isolate what exactly is causing this issues and find a solution faster.

There have been suggestions offered on the forums to adjust the Windows system hardware acceleration. It is recommend to first try turning down the quality slider in Guild Wars to see if this resolves the issues (again, remember to restart the game after doing so). Note that turning Windows acceleration completely off essentially disables DirectSound, using an emulated high-latency audio path instead. This is very likely to negatively affect the audio (skipping, stuttering, etc), and unfortunately is not a problem that can be ‘fixed’ at the application level.

We hope that this info is helpful to you, and welcome your feedback.

Putting a notification in the Settings (F11) window that the game needs to be restarted after adjusting the slider, or even popping up a window that states as much, would be a huge help. We get a great many posts here with people saying, "I moved the Quality slider but nothing happened."

Most people don't have any problems with position 3 on the slider. It seems to more or less default to the sound engine used before the slider was implemented. Positions 4 and 5 are where the majority of weird problems arise, as browsing the many topics in this forum will show. I'm surprised that position 4 (HW acceleration without EAX) doesn't work properly on so many systems, even those with high-end sound cards. But it's nice to get a clarification statement from the programmer, even if it is quite a few months and headaches late.

Why is it a slider to begin with?

It isn't a volume changer. And it sure isn't informative.

Use a drop down box. Makes sense?

All I know is that if I slide the slider to the right (higher quality) the game starts going slow and fps drops. This is particularly noticable in the Ring of Fire island chain.

And here is more information about changes that came in yesterday's major update. I think you'll be pleased with all this!

Here’s what’s changed:

• A number of internal optimizations have been made to improve performance.
• With the new Options dialog, players can now explicitly choose whether to use hardware mode or hardware + EAX with checkboxes.
• The Sound Quality slider now just changes the maximum number of voices used and the frequency of sound updates / calculations.
• In hardware mode, internal quality will be reduced to the quality slider or the capabilities of the card, whichever is lower.
• You will no longer hear effects when the game window loses focus. We’ll add a checkbox later to keep all audio playing even if the game window loses focus.
• A new diagnostic command-line has been added: -mute. This essentially performs all file loading, decoding, and other application-level sound system calculations as normal, but does not play the final audio through DirectSound. This can be useful in determining how much CPU time is being used by DirectSound and audio drivers.

Hope this is helpful info.

Well that sounds a lil better, lag is one thing I can tolerate every now and then, but regular in-game stuff can get annoying. Its nice to know they are still trying to fix things

Sound quality overall is MUCH better, but there is a lot of popping / cracking noise now. Still a step in the right direction, separating hardware / EAX from quality. Definitely a step in the right direction, and it'll be bliss once the pops are fixed. Thanks for the improvements.

Thank you greatly for providing this info, it's is very useful to know.

The EAX is great option, espically for users with inexpensive on-board audio drivers but decent DirectSound 3d support.

Question I have is?
Is there any plans to add a box to turn on / off DirectSong?

Hmmm, can't select EAX with an Audigy soundcard ?

I can with my Audigy 2.

And my Old Audigy 1 Platinum

By any chance do you have your Windows hardware acceleration settings set to anything less than max? This will cause EAX or other extensions to be disabled.

Thats sorted it. I had knocked it back a notch because of the annoying strange sounds that were occouring randomly after one of the updates the other week.

Thanks all.

kvndoom, be sure you are using the latest drivers for your sound card. Updating the drivers a while ago had fixed some problems in hardware mode for me.

Also, you might want to post more detailed system info in case the devs read this, or Gaile forwards this info to them. Or, maybe inform tech support about the issue. For instance, what kind of sound card you have, and what settings you hear the popping / crackling at. You never know, it might help - it's hard to expect the devs to know about the problem you're having if you don't tell them about it.

I'm not sure if this helps you ET, but you can essentially disable DirectSong by renaming your DirectSong directory or the GuildWars.ds file.

I'm sort of curious - why do you want an option to turn off DirectSong?

Any plans to deliver the promised fix for DirectSong which is now about a year overdue? I'm referring to DS no longer playing in towns or outposts as it originally did. DS support told me over a year ago that a GW fix was "coming soon."

With my onboard sound card I can't hear any difference by moving the quality slider or by turning on EAX. The music is weak and staticy as it's been since Beta. Of course, the downloaded DirectSong files are very poor quality, so that just makes it worse. BattlePak in particular sounds like it was re-mastered from an old, degenerating vinyl.

I don't have Factions, but do remember that the sound in Factions Preview was shockingly clean and crisp.

Actually a lot of people were getting the popping noise, and it came right after the NF update, so I seriously doubt it's driver related. Otherwise it would have been there all along. Personally I use KX Project drivers for my Audigy 2 because Creative's drivers suck so horribly that it's beyond words (they have a bug with 4-channel surround that will never be fixed), and they don't support EAX, which I don't care about anyway. Because I don't use manufacturer's drivers, I don't really expect any personal support for sound issues that might be caused by my system, but it's easy to know when the game engine itself is at fault. Last night's patch seemed to fix a lot of that pop and static anyway.

I have a Creative Audigy 2 using Creative's drivers. I have noticed a marked improvement in sound as of the NF patch, aside from the popping/crackling which happened because at that time I wasn't aware Anet added the EAX and positional audio checkboxes.

After checking all the boxes, sound has been quite simply sublime. I can now hear sounds I never heard before, like animal cries, and positional audio plays like it should with no more muffled sounds out of the blue.

It could be the imagination playing tricks, but my system seems to run much cooler and smoother now that sound has been properly sorted out.

Direct song doesn't have a way to properly turn it off. Delete files or edit the windows registery.

Some users in the forums have reported issues with loading in to zone delay when direct song wants to kick in on non-Windows Media Player 10 (aka non Windows XP machines).

It changes the music score greatly. In the past they had the issue where the same 5ish songs played over and over again. They have most fixed this but still changes the default audio.

Gaile, I do have a question, DirectSong guildwars.ds & guildwars.dll is distbuted via DirectSong. Issues resolved with the updated trigger/que sheet don't get updated if a person doesn't get a newer direct song pack or manually update the guildwars.ds file. (The same song repeated over and over again isssue may still be out there for people who do not buy a newer pack or manually get the file from DirectSongs FTP Site.)

Is there any plans to distrubute this file(s) via guildwars and move the required files to link in to direct song (looking at windows registery as to where the files are)?

speaking of sound last night i did Hell's principe and at the end Glint's words kept overlapping she started her next sentence while the other was still going...

Yeah, i was in Fissure last night and heard sounds I'd never heard before either, pretty cool!

This was fixed a long time ago. Download the latest GuildWars.ds file from DirectSong's site - it should fix things up for you.

Unfortunately, looks like I'm still in the group of people left out in the cold completely with severe performance issues unless I play the game with the -nosound or -mute switch.

See my thread: http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10014590