[crossfire] Sound support on GTKv2

[Mark Wedel]

On 09/ 2/13 09:53 AM, Kevin Zheng wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> A big element missing from Crossfire is sound. While sound support has
> existed for quite a long time, it has consistently failed to work on
> newer installations. In addition, sound files have remained untouched
> for many releases. I intend to fix this.
>
> A quick glance through the client sound sources show that a great deal
> of effort has been put through to make it work with several major sound
> systems out there. While supporting many sound systems is good, it has
> become overly cumbersome and makes the source hard to work with.
>
> For this reason, I propose that sound support should be discontinued for
> every system except for SDL_mixer. SDL_mixer is a high-level library
> that supports ALSA, OSS, and many other lower-level sound systems.
> SDL_mixer also supports OGG, which enables us to use a higher-level
> sound format other than the raw PCM file we use today. Hopefully this
> will make sound contributions easier, too.
>
> I would like to be able to start working on the code changes in the very
> near future. Questions/comments/hate mail?

  I have no objection, but at the same time, since most of the code is #ifdef if 
the sound system exists, there isn't as a compelling reason to remove the old 
ones vs just adding a new one, and making it first choice if multiple options 
are found.

  I can't remember all the history of why all those other sound systems got 
added support - it seems that SDL has existed for near as long as the client 
has, so I don't know if it has limitations on certain systems.

  Of course the problem is also whether to target SDL 1.x or SDL 2.x - not sure 
how much the API has changed.  Clearly 2.x would be desired long term, but short 
term, I'm not sure how many people would be running SDL 2.x, so if only that was 
supported, it might remove sound support for a lot of people.

  OTOH, sound was never a key part of the game, so if certain people do not have 
sound support, it would hardly be the end of the world.