Android - Bug Mechanical sound delay

PiN WiZ · Feb 24, 2012

I've been experiencing about a half second delay on all mechanical sounds such as flippers, slingshots, bumpers, etc. on all tables since launch. This doesn't affect gameplay in any way, but would like to see if this problem can be corrected.

Nik Barbour · Feb 24, 2012

This seems OK on my android.
Do you get any video lag at the same time as the audio?

Ryan Routon · Feb 24, 2012

This is something we have discussed at length and unfortunately it seems that Android does have some issue with native side sound latency. Here is a link if you are interested:

http://www.rossbencina.com/code/dave-sparks-on-android-audio-latency-at-google-io-2011

They say:

“Latency is a big problem. We’re working at, hopefully we hope to be able to do something about it with ICS. As we investigated it it’s actually a pretty complex problem. There are a number of different places where latency gets introduced. Most of the latency is introduced below Android. Basically it’s happening in the drivers or in the chipsets or somewhere in there, and some of these are really obscene amounts like hundreds of milliseconds of latency in the audio path. So, that’s something we’re going to push on. We started/ I think we introduced something in CDD Gingerbread which was a “should” hit certain latencies.
There are some interesting problems we need to solve in the scheduler, so I’ll be talking to Rebecca shortly about this. Because the fair scheduler makes it really difficult to make sure that these low latency audio threads get scheduled when we need them to be scheduled every single time. That’s probably the biggest issue we’re running into right now. But it’s a problem we want to deal with and hopefully the next release will get it. Obviously it’s not going to solve the problems for legacy devices but it’s going to get better.”

We plan to pre-load flipper sounds into a sound pool and see if that helps, but have not got around to it with the launch issues we have been having.

PiN WiZ · Feb 24, 2012

Everything else runs smooth, it's just the slight sound delay from the mechanical sounds. I thought it was a little weird since I've never had any kind of sound delay on anything else.

Nik Barbour · Feb 24, 2012

Sounds annoying!
Anyone else Android got this problem?

PiN WiZ · Feb 27, 2012

Thanks for the info Ryan...it's not a huge problem for me and does not take away from the enjoyment I have playing TPA. Just thought I would mention it. I'm sure you have other issues you need to address before looking into minor sound issues. Keep up the good work and hope the console versions are still on target for March 28.

Ryan Routon · Feb 27, 2012

It has been bugging us too, and we are hoping a soundpool method for flippers and other mechanicals will be enough to make it feel realtime. It varies on devices too (for example Kindle fire is one of the worst due to hardware).

jaredmorgs · May 15, 2012

Ryan Routon said:
This is something we have discussed at length and unfortunately it seems that Android does have some issue with native side sound latency. Here is a link if you are interested:

http://www.rossbencina.com/code/dave-sparks-on-android-audio-latency-at-google-io-2011

They say:

...Because the fair scheduler makes it really difficult to make sure that these low latency audio threads get scheduled when we need them to be scheduled every single time. That’s probably the biggest issue we’re running into right now. But it’s a problem we want to deal with and hopefully the next release will get it. Obviously it’s not going to solve the problems for legacy devices but it’s going to get better.”

We plan to pre-load flipper sounds into a sound pool and see if that helps, but have not got around to it with the launch issues we have been having.

For those Android users with rooted devices and custom kernels, you might want to try experimenting with the I/O scheduler your phone uses to handle threads in general. On the ROM and Kernel I'm using, there are about 5 schedulers to choose from. What one to use? Check this thread on XDA forums: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1369817 for guidance (it's long, but really worth the read).

PiN WiZ · May 16, 2012

Ok, after further testing, the half a second sound delay is gone from the flipper sounds, but still present on the rest of the mechanical sounds after updating to 1.0.6 on HTC EVO 3D.

jaredmorgs · May 29, 2012

PiN WiZ said:
Ok, after further testing, the half a second sound delay is gone from the flipper sounds, but still present on the rest of the mechanical sounds after updating to 1.0.6 on HTC EVO 3D.

I can confirm this behavior on my SGS2 as well.

Don't know if Farsight has considered it, but I would like to only have mechanical sounds only, and not environmental sounds such as rolling ball noises (which actually sound terrible when using headphones).

I know that Farsight will be reworking the mechanical sounds in future releases, however only having solenoid and motor sounds seems more logical to me.

If you are playing the table with the glass on, it would be rare for you to hear rolling ball noises unless you were playing in a very quiet environment with the machine audio turned down.

Android - Bug Mechanical sound delay

PiN WiZ

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