maximum number of ambient_generic? Created 7 years ago2017-05-17 13:33:13 UTC by Dallas

Does anyone know the maximum number of ambient_generics that can be playing at once AND be audible by the player?

Can the player, say, hear 10 different .wav sounds, or will only a few of them be played and some be culled or inaudible?

Are the rules different if some of the ambient_generics are playing the same .wav?

Thanks for any input.

There are 128 "channels" that all per-entity audio plays on. Whenever an entity plays a sound, it will use a channel, so up to 128 sounds can be playing at any time, excluding music started using the cdaudio entities and player voice.

If you see this message in the console with developer set to 2 or higher, you'll know you've exceeded the total number of concurrent sounds:

total_channels == MAX_CHANNELS

Yeah... when you have a dm with 10 or 20 players in a small map, all the footsteps, shots, explosions, snarks can easily add up to a 100 at once

Just the information I needed, thank you.

Is there a console command that lists or dumps the value of the current number of used channels?

i.e. is there a way to check how many channels you are using in game to then know how much headroom you have to work with?

The soundinfo command prints current sound info to the console ("total channels" is the current number of active channels), setting s_show to 1 and running a server with maxplayers 2 or fewer prints up to 32 sounds on the right hand side of the screen.

Note that there are always 12 active channels from what i can tell, those are special ones.

The first 4 are ambient sounds (seems to be obsolete from Quake, used to be defined in BSPs but never read), then there are 8 dynamic channels. A comment from WinQuake explains this:

0 to MAX_DYNAMIC_CHANNELS-1 = normal entity sounds
MAX_DYNAMIC_CHANNELS to MAX_DYNAMIC_CHANNELS + NUM_AMBIENTS -1 = water, etc
MAX_DYNAMIC_CHANNELS + NUM_AMBIENTS to total_channels = static sounds

It's actually 0 to NUM_AMBIENTS - 1, then NUM_AMBIENTS to MAX_DYNAMIC_CHANNELS + NUM_AMBIENTS - 1, then NUM_AMBIENTS + MAX_DYNAMIC_CHANNELS to total_channels.

ambient_generic plays static sounds, so there are 128 - 12 = 116 static channels available.