AudioStreamRandomizer high performance cost

darthpejka

Hi all!
So I've been working on a SHMUP-style game for a while now, and recently decided to finally add some sound effects, and I decided to use AudioStreamRandomizer with several slight variations of a sound so as to avoid obnoxiously loud bursts of the same sound when there's tons of bullets created at the same time. It worked well for dozens per second, but when creating a few hundred, I started to notice lagging. Initially I suspected it's due to object creation/deletion, but looking harder at the profiler I noticed it's just the audio:

Is this normal? Am I expecting too much or should I just find a way to reduce the number of times a sample should be played? Or could it be the sign of an issue with the engine?

DaveTheCoder

You could place a limit on the number of sounds that are concurrently playing.

When a sound is played, increment a counter. When the sound finishes playing, decrement the counter .

Don't play a sound if the counter is greater than the limit.

You might need to use a Mutex to protect the counter's incrementing/decrementing.

Using a separate thread for playing the sounds might help too.

darthpejka

DaveTheCoder It is limited actually, I set the max polyphony to 16, which is why it seems odd. FL Studio has no problem playing a lot more sounds at the same time, so that leads me to believe there is something wonky going on when play() is called here.
Using a separate thread for audio sounds like a good idea though, I'll look into it, thanks!

darthpejka

In case anyone else finds this post, I figured out the solution, but it was quite a stupid mistake actually. I used .ogg files for the sound effects, and it seems like that decoding overhead caused a significant performance drop with so many sounds trying to play at once. Using plain .wav files improved things dramatically.