Re: Sound Support

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald@phy.cmich.edu>]

Elijah Meeks wrote:

> I know the Mac can play sounds, any chance of the SDL
> / TCLTK version being able to in the near future?

I've been thinking about it wrt the SDL interface. SDL does have 
built-in sound support. The question is getting the sounds into the 
right format. It is certainly somewhere on my agenda.

Is the new Windows SDL interface working okay for you? I tested with 
Opal and didn't have any problems.

The two things that are most pressing on my SDL agenda as of right now:
(1) Add support for modal dialog windows. This is particularly crucial 
for yes/no/cancel type things. Right now, if you type "Q" in the Windows 
interface, you have no indication that the SDL interface is asking you 
if you want to save the game before you quit, even though it is. If you 
type "y" in answer to the hidden question, the game will quit. Since 
this is not at all obvious, it would be nice to provide some sort of 
visual indicator. I think I will probably use graphical buttons for 
"Yes", "No", and "Cancel"; that way I can set them up to be customized 
on a per-game basis later on.
(2) Add a log panel so that users can have written feedback. Under 
Linux, an user can see log messages in the terminal window, but under 
Windows there is no visible terminal window, and so I need to make sure 
that the messages go somewhere where the user can see them. And, as 
Lincoln pointed out, it is annoying to keep switching between windows to 
see the output.

Eric