Make sure your in-game sound setting is set to "3D" and not "Mono" otherwise you will not be making use of the directional sound engine. You should see your new value in parenthesis next to the entry. Any value up to 32 will allow exactly that amount of sounds before cut offs occur, and any value beyond 32 will result in no sounds getting cut off.ĥ) Press OK. You can simply download and run the attached registry edit, or do it manually:ġ) Open the registry editor by typing "regedit" (without the quotes) into the start menu run command (on XP and earlier) or the start menu search box (on Vista/Win7).Ģ) Using the folder tree, navigate to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Cavedog Entertainment\Total Annihilation" to view the TA registry keys.ģ) Double click the "MixingBuffers" entry to bring up the edit box.Ĥ) Set the base to "decimal" and type in the number of simultaneous sounds you want. To make use of this trick, you need to edit the relevant registry key. Gameplay sounds much better now, sounds no longer get cut out left and right, though of course when you have a huge battle going on some sounds are always going to drown out others in terms of volume, but it's a nice improvement overall. Back in the 90's high-end sound cards typically supported a maximum of 32 discrete voices, so it makes sense that something else starts happening beyond that number.Īnyway, I've had it set to 64 but you could set it to 33 and get the same effect. I'm not sure what's going on exactly, I guess when set beyond 32 sounds must be getting mixed together in software rather than being dropped, because there's no way there are actually over 128 simultaneous discrete voices happening on hardware. This doesn't really make much sense, since even a Creative X-Fi sound card only supports a maximum of 128 in-game voices, and lower-end hardware and software solutions support far less. I've tested at 64 sounds and even 128 sounds and I haven't yet heard a sound get cut off. With any limit beyond 32, I haven't been able to get a single in-game sound to cut out. What's interesting is that setting the limit to anything beyond 32 seems to allow for infinite sounds. Leaving the limit at 8 results in the 9th earliest sound getting cut off, while setting the limit at 16 makes the 17th earliest sound get cut off and setting the limit at 32 makes the 33rd earliest sound get cut off. I've found that increasing the limit up to 32 voices results in exactly what you would expect. Of course, there is no performance hit on modern computers. What I've found is that, yes, raising the limit actually does increase the number of simultaneous sounds that can play and stops sounds from getting cut off. However, no one seems to ever have tested whether or not raising the limit actually does anything, so I've done some careful testing to see what happens. It's long been known that the registry entry called "mixingbuffers" controls this limit, and people would often lower it to improve performance. In fact, even 8 was too much for many people because of the lag that would be caused in online matches by EMG weapons (the infamous "flash lag"). The limit of 8 was fine when TA was released because not everyone had a sound card that could handle a lot of voices, CPUs were weak, and internet connections were slow. This is highly noticeable in-game, especially when there's a large battle going on you will notice that various weapon effects and unit selection sounds get cut short. Total Annihilation's default limit for simultaneous in-game sounds (also known as "voices") is 8, meaning that only 8 sounds can play at once and any sound that came before the last 8 will get cut off.
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