Second Life Sound Issues

Keltic — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:54:29 +0000

I’ve encountered an interesting limitation with sound in Second Life. You can only play a single sound from each script at any given time. If you have a script where you’d like to play a looping background sound and then play separate sounds based on events, you can’t. You are limited to a single sound playing at one time for each script. You can define whether additional sounds should cut-off and replace the current sound or should be queued to play after the current sound, but it’s only one at a time.Why the limitation? I could see limiting to 16, 8, or even 4 simultaneous sounds per script. If the concern is flooding the client with sounds, then that could be addressed by defining an overall limitation in the client, which I would hope exists already. This limitation simply forces anyone wishing to create a sound rich environment to create additional scripts for each sound. Inefficient.

Also, why are their separate functions for llPlaySound() and llLoopSound()? These should be a single function with an addition boolean parameter to define whether the clip loops. The same applies to llTriggerSound(). A boolean parameter defines whether the sound follows the prim it’s attached to or remains at the location it was created at. The new function could look like this, with the two new parameters (loop and follow) being optional and defaulting to false for backward compatibility.

llPlaySound(string sound, float volume, integer loop, integer follow)

Keltic Games » loop

Second Life Sound Issues