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Airline Tycoon DeluxeWindows 8 lag fixed?(3 posts)(3 posts)
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Posted March 26, 2015
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zeffyr: Small lags (2-3 secs) happened to me few times, between MIDI tracks - one ended, the second one was about to start and game froze. No biggie though.
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Pidgeot: That *particular* issue is because the MIDI synthesizer that Windows uses has a crazy long startup time when using the high-level MIDI API in modern Windows versions. (There are 3 such APIs; in my experience, only the highest-level API, MCI, is affected).

One option is therefore to tell Windows to use a different MIDI synth by default - but googling suggests this has been removed in Windows 8, and even so, it would have to be up to each user to do so.

The other, more reliable option, is to switch MIDI APIs, to e.g. the stream-based API, which does not exhibit this issue. This, however, requires modifying the source code, and unfortunately, the source code included here is not complete; it refers to some libraries which are not included, so it is not really possible to make a custom build.

It is theoretically possible to hack the executable to replace the existing code - the source code helps to understand the structure of the code, so it is easier to reverse engineer things - but that is still going to require a fair amount of effort :) It also seems like part of the music code might be in one of those missing libraries, but I haven't checked if it actually makes use of it...
The one thing I know that is missing from the source code that we provide is the Smacker library from RAD Tools. As for anything else being missing, I have no idea as I am not a programmer/developer.
Posted November 19, 2015
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Pidgeot: Smacker is not freely available, so it makes sense that one is missing, but there are definitely other missing files that aren't Smacker-related.

It seems that only the "main" source code has been kept - C++ files (.cpp and .h) from the main code directory have been included, along with a Visual Studio project file (AT.DSP); everything else, including code in subfolders, is gone. This includes some program resources, and some documentation that is referenced in the project file, and three libraries which appear to be developed internally at Spellbound (SBL, SSE, TeakLibW).

According to the file SSE.h, SSE is short for Spellbound SoundEngine. This seems to be the code that handles MIDI playback, and there's a matching sse.dll in the game directory which appears to contain the code for the library (so hacking would target the sse.dll file, possibly by reimplementing it entirely?).

I don't know if Black Forest Games are allowed (and willing) to add the source code of the SoundEngine, but if they did, that should be enough to allow someone else to fix the MIDI lag without too much trouble (should just be a matter of compiling a new DLL).
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PoTskii: Would have loved to get the library files for AT so we can get this game working. Don't know why they release the source without the custom library files. :S seems strange.
Check the source again :)

Keep in mind though that the game does make use of some proprietary libraries that cannot be freely distributed with the source.
Posted November 21, 2015
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JudasIscariot: Check the source again :)

Keep in mind though that the game does make use of some proprietary libraries that cannot be freely distributed with the source.
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Pidgeot: It's not ideal for fixing the MIDI issue I was talking about earlier (since that's still in one of the libraries, SSE.lib), but it does at least provide additional information that might be useful to reimplement it (still requires some reverse engineering, of course).
So even though you have the SSE.lib file now, it's still not all that helpful?
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Airline Tycoon DeluxeWindows 8 lag fixed?(3 posts)(3 posts)
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