H-uru
Sound Playback issues in Korman-built ages
Noticing a sound playback issue which appears to be common to ages built with (or imported to) Korman. What I suspect is happening based on the evidence I've seen so far is - left/right audio sometimes plays slightly out of sync, resulting in what sounds like a "comb filter."
You can hear isolated examples of this in the video below - in most cases, an example of sound playing back "normally" is included, then an example of it playing back "out of sync" for comparison. https://youtu.be/sVSdBgdTr68
For future reference: stereo 3D sound emitters need to have plStereizer modifiers attached to reposition them at runtime. This may fix the reported issue.
After experimentation, separating 3D stereo sounds into separate emitter scene objects and attaching plStereizer to each does not fix the issue cited. I am currently leaning toward the problem being that the mono emitters start at slightly offset times.
@Hoikas has pointed out something particularly eye-opening to me in a conversation on Discord, and I figured this was worth summarizing and documenting here in the ticket. Basically: when you put a sound into a 3D space like this, you are tying this to a specific emitter, and if you make this a stereo sound, all that's really happening is we will be playing both audio channels from that same space. So there is no real benefit to having any of these spatialized sounds be stereo, and they should probably be mixed down to mono anyway, as a best practice.
Now, that's not what the "out of phase" problem is, and this is still an issue probably worth investigating, but it does give us a partial explanation, as well as provide a path for creators to sidestep this issue entirely: as long as spatialized sound is mono, creators won't run into this issue, as there are no L/R channels in contention to worry about. Korman 0.15 will also warn users that this (using stereo spatialized sound) is bad practice.