Sound Alerts are VERY broken -- Save time and don't try them

[dillonml]

Well I've spent considerable time working on getting the sound alerts to work and FINALLY noticed whats going on.

And for the select few no-life people who scan these forums to reply only "use the search feature duh" I did use the search and I found many posts on this topic. All of which only asked why it wont work and suggested things to try but I never once saw anyone say "it's working for me" so i'm fairly sure this is a problem across the board.

Anyway on to whats happening.

When you enable:

SpawnFilterAudio 1

some wierd things happen right now with the newest code. The next time you load an EQ zone that has mobs pop up that are *suppose* to trigger a sound it changes the line in the config from:

LocateSpawnAudioCommand "/root/locate.sh &" (or anything else that you put in here)

to

LocateSpawnAudioCommand /usr/bin/esdplay spawn.wave &" &"


Notice the now non existant quotation mark at the start of the command and now there is an extra space ampersand and quotation at the end.

What's happening is anytim the sound alert is triggered showeq is not just reading this line from the config, it's actually writing the line back (which is very poor coding btw for any config setup.. should be reading ONLY) it's also running into a memory overlap and/or error where random sized small portions of the previous existing entry are left behind/combined wih the line as it gets written back.

Follow me here?

Go enable the spawnfilteraudio and change the line to be your custom sound file setting then restart showeq and check the file again you'll see what I mean.

This is why it never works, it's not your settings, it's simply a bug. So stop wracking your brains trying to make it work guys :)

Just wanted ot save everyone some time.

[MarkJames]

My sound alerts work very well.

[Ratt]

Sound alerts are working as intended. I use sound alerts every day, and they have no problem playing repeatedly.

[fryfrog]

yup, i have to agree they work... i used some at&t research site to make some sounds "spawn" "despawn" and "death" and... well, any time something in the filters_zonename.conf file spawns, despawns or dies i hear in a very computer girly voice "spawn" or "despawn" or "death"

so... yeah, it works just fine. make sure the showeq.conf file points to a valid wav file...

like "/usr/bin/esdplay /usr/local/share/showeq/spawn.wav &" and it should be good as good stuff.

oh, yeah, i had that over write problem myself. you have to MAKRE SURE you exit showeq completely BEFORE you make the changes. i would edit the conf file when showeq was running, and those lines would end up like ...

"/usr/bin/esdplay /usr/local/share/showeq/spawn.wav" /usr/bin/esdplay /usr/local/share/showeq/spawn.wav "& or something. just exit showeq, edit your conf file then fire it back up.

you might try making a copy of the good one before you re-fire up showeq just so if it DOES goof up no hand editing, just re-copy.

if it didn't write on exit, you would have to choose the settings manually, or change them EVERYTIME you wanted something different from the last time you opened it. saving to the conf file is a good thing, imho.

[BlueAdept]

Sorry to say...but sounds are working for me also.

[Tyrvidarus]

Homer still very gleefully shouts WOOHOO when stuff spawns and DOHETH when something dies or despawns, and I am not even close to proficiant in Linux. The conf file explains it perfectly.

[Ataal]

I think what he meant is that the sounds do not work by default, he was merely pointing out why.

I've seen so many walkthroughs on setting up RH7.2 and SEQ here, I'm surprised that these boards aren't overrun by sound alert walkthroughs.

[Ratt]

Not sure what you mean they don't work by default. They work for me by default ...

[Ataal]

As fry said:

"so... yeah, it works just fine. make sure the showeq.conf file points to a valid wav file... "

So, what I meant by it does not work by default, I mean there is still some user intervention required is all.....

[Ratt]

As fry said:

"so... yeah, it works just fine. make sure the showeq.conf file points to a valid wav file... "

So, what I meant by it does not work by default, I mean there is still some user intervention required is all.....

Well... yes, I suppose if you look at it that way, it won't work by default. However, just because that .wav file doesn't exist, I don't think it would produce the problem described in the original message. It would just do nothing basically, perhaps return an error to the console.

I can't imagine why it would over write the conf file.

[lostpacket]

I was having problems with sound also. I looked at everything, even went so far as to reinstall (only a 15 minute install for full RH 7.2 and SEQ) ....only to see that my speakers were unplugged.

I haven't cried in a long time, but oh the tears flowed last night. Stupidity hurts.

[fryfrog]

These are the sounds i use in showeq for spawn, despawn and death. they are all very small but easy to understand. if any of the devs would like to include them by default into the CVS it might make some people happy. if you would like to download these, i have compressed them and put them here (http://fryfrog.dyndns.org:81/files/showeq.wav.tar.bz2). it is in bz2 format cause thats smaller, use "tar jxvf" instead of "tar zxvf" to extract ;)



[root@mystique showeq]# ls -al *.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11268 Feb 11 18:02 death.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 19460 Feb 11 18:02 despawn.wav
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15100 Feb 11 18:02 spawn.wav


ps: i forgot to mention, i got these from an at&t research page that was posted here or at hackersquest.org at some point. they are a semi-girl computer generated voice saying "spawn" "despawn" or "death".

[devnul]

I believe the bug (corrupting the sound command lines in showeq.conf

a la

"LocateSpawnAudioCommand "/root/locate.sh &" (or anything else that you put in here)

to

LocateSpawnAudioCommand /usr/bin/esdplay spawn.wave &" &" "

as the orginal poster mentions, happen when the command is somehow invalid

one solution is to chmod -w showeq.conf

but this is still a bug.

dn