Basic Bugginess: positional sounds and mobile controls

Help & Support
1

https://playcanvas.com/project/994988/overview/the-mellow-tiger

As I move forward, I want to nail down some basic bugs I’ve encountered.

One is positional sounds-- I am using them for passing vehicles, since I can illustrate a long growing and fading engine sound with positional audio and a very small, looping sound file. But the known bug seems to be that positional sounds cause crackling issues on iOS (at least). I am reluctant to duplicate the effect with a non-positional sound, since it would require a much longer (larger) sound file. Shall I assume this is necessary for now?

Two: I’ve implemented the mobile navigation controls used in Seemore, but they seem to glitch out/crash with some regularity (one or the other of the invisible joysticks simply stops working). This isn’t my preferred navigation method to begin with (I greatly prefer a simple swipe for the look control rather than a joystick, which is pretty clunky) but is this a known issue with the controls simply losing function?

Finally (and perhaps least important) the level still seems to crash even on some computers. I assume this is an unavoidable artifact of a large, demanding 3D experience on lesser computers?

2

1 They are bugs to do with the browser and there are open tickets on their bug trackers. Little we can do here. Depending on your specific effect, you can try animating the volume over time to get a similar effect of close/near.

2 Those controls have been touched for a while. Can you replicate the glitches/crashes in the Seemore project itself? If so, please post the repro steps here and someone can go an investigate.

Doing a on screen joystick is something on my to do list for a while.

Another alternative control scheme that could work is using touch to look around and pinch in/out to move back/forward. Good for small areas.

  1. Crashes are related to your VRAM usage. If the computer doesn’t have enough VRAM available it will crash. I would look at which particular lightmapped areas are causing that large usage and whether you can mitigate that somehow.

Using ‘baked’ lighting where textures can be Basis compressed can help too Lightmapping | Learn PlayCanvas