Really happy this project is still on-going.
As you say, the sounds can be pre-loaded in to fast ram and played from there, and maybe I presume this is how The Settlers does it, after it detects 030 and enough ram. If players have enough ram to play the whole game from memory, surely they have enough to copy a few sample packs to fast memory. With my games, I always save the samples at x3 speed, and play them back x3 times slower, This means they are only one third of the size they were originally, and that means they load 3 times quicker. There is also a way to do live shuffling. So if there there are no waves on screen but some moutains, it shuffles out the waves and loads in the wind. This should mean far less audio needs to be loaded in and out of the memory SFX pool.
I think Amiga Bill gave you a shout out last weekend.
Viewing post in Ambient Sound Update - August 2025 comments
Thanks for your post.
But there is a missunderstanding. I do not load all the ambient sound samples into Fast-RAM if there is enough RAM, because i do not now how to do this in AmiBlitz3 :-( I can only load sound effects into Chip-RAM, that is the reason why Settle the World needs a fast Harddrive/ CF etc. to load and play all the sound effects. I am not finished optimizing this ambient sound part. For now the sounds are randomly choosen based on the terrain tiles on the map. For every terrain tile there are up to three different sound effects.
I have two banks with a fixed size in Chip-RAM were the sound effects are loaded in. Then the sound-length is calculated and the sound is played from the bank, so that for short sound no part of a previous (longer) sound effect will be played. Shortly after a sound effect was played the next sound effect is loaded into the bank.
Your post is very interesing, perhaps we should continue this discussion via emal or on our Settle the World Discord ;-) https://discord.gg/UJyZSJJqYg