AGS: The Cat Lady: Missing ticking sound on intro sequence (clock "seconds" sound).

[antoniou79]

This is on ScummVM 2.8git, built from current master HEAD, on Windows 10 x64 for the Steam version of The Cat Lady (English).

When starting a new game, early on during the intro sequence, there is a scene showing part of a clock with a cat's tail counting the seconds while moving left and right.

If the game is run from Steam, then there's a repeating ticking sound effect playing at each "second" of the clock.

From ScummVM, this sound effect is missing, ie. not playing. Other sound effects, voices and music seem to be playing fine though. For example, after a few seconds, there's another slightly different tick sfx marking the passing of a "minute". This sfx plays on ScummVM too.

There's no perinent error message output in the background console as far as I can tell.

[antoniou79]

From some debugging, I think I have figured which audio clip it is supposed to play, but not why it does not.

It seems it's a audio clip of type "3", scriptName "aSound55" and filename "au000049.wav".
It's supposed to play with default priority (50), non-looping -- it's called to play explicitly at each clock's "second".

The functions that are involved in the setup of playing this clip seem to return normal values, ie. non nullptr.

Also might be of help(?) The game's "Data version" is detected as 49 < kGameVersion_360.

Here's the entire output on the background console:

Running The Cat Lady (Steam)
thecatlady.exe: 0ea2b985dc5d7d27cb7c1b7da5eedea0, 53988582 bytes.
WARNING: TODO: SetCurrentDirectory: D:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/TheCatLady/!
Initializing backend libs
Initializing game data
Opened game data file: game28.dta
Game data version: 49
Compiled with: 3.4.1.11
Startup directory: ./
Data directory: ./
Setting up game configuration
WARNING: FSNode::createDirectory: './//.' already exists!
Voice pack found: speech.vox
audio.vox found and initialized.
Initializing TTF renderer
Initializing mouse: number of buttons reported is 3
Install timer
Initialize legacy path finder library
Game title: 'The Cat Lady'
Game uid (old format): `5796310`
Game guid: '{d5a77d19-7518-4142-be0c-71c232c1acce}'
Game GUI version: 118
Requested script API: v3.4.1 (5), compat level: v3.3.4 (2)
Plugin 'agsblend' loaded from 'agsblend.dll', resolving imports...
Plugin 'agsd3dvsync' is not yet supported
Plugin 'agsd3dvsync' could not be loaded (expected 'agsd3dvsync.dll')
Plugin 'agsteam' loaded from 'agsteam.dll', resolving imports...
Checking for disk space
Game native resolution: 800 x 600 (32 bit)
Graphic settings: driver: D3D9, windowed: no, screen size: 0 x 0, game scale: proportional
Requested graphics driver 'D3D9' not found, will try existing drivers instead
Graphics mode set: 800 x 600 (32-bit) fullscreen desktop
WARNING: movement control not supported, mouse control can't be enabled!
Mouse speed control: enabled, unit: 1.000000, user value: 1.000000
Multitasking mode set: 0
Setting up window
Multitasking mode set: 0
Initialize sprites
Engine initialization complete
Starting game
WARNING: channel 2 - same clip assigned
Quitting the game...
WARNING: movement control not supported, mouse control can't be enabled!
***** ENGINE HAS SHUTDOWN

The "WARNING: channel 2 - same clip assigned" happens before I click on "New Game" so it seems unrelated to the issue.

[tag2015]

This is an upstream bug. The culprit is commit ​9619169
(upstream ​90a60ff)

Volume is clamped to 0-100, but if the value is negative (which originally meant "don't override volume value") it causes it to silence the sample. It also affects other games besides "The Cat Lady".

Checking if volume is >=0 before clamping is enough to fix the issue, but maybe volume should be prevented to go negative in the first place.
I'll open a bugreport on the AGS tracker

[tag2015]

​https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/issues/1982

[tag2015]

This was a really small change, so I pushed now the upstream fix
​150df39