Could some one make a Portable apps port of Lbreakout2?
http://lgames.sourceforge.net/index.php?project=LBreakout2
Thanks
New: Run-Command (Dec 2, 2024), Platform 29.5.3 (Jun 27, 2024)
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Just download the zip package from their website. Its fully portable out of the box and stores your settings in the App´s folder.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
here.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
I like the game a lot and it works all right but I heard some people complaining about the quality of the sound and I had the same problem with the game for many years in different Windows machines from Windows 2000 to Windows Vista 64 bit.
I saw in the beta testing thread that some people mentioned the sound being kinda scratchy and that is exactly what I been getting for many years.
I decided to check this and I took a look at the sound files in the sounds folder and I played them outside the game (is easy to do cause they are .wav files) and I noticed that they sound that bad outside the game so it is not a problem with the game sound engine but with the quality of the original sounds.
I confirmed this by loading several of them in Adobe Sound Booth and I noticed that the graphics of the ones that sound worst are intermittent (sort of leaving spaces) indicating that the sounds were probably upsampled from much lower resolution files.
The format of the current files indicates that they are at the moment stored as 22 Khz .wavs. I don't know the history of the creation of the sound files but I don't have to to know that to know that they are probably very old and were originally created at a much lower sampling rate.
Perhaps they were created at 8 Khz or at 11 Khz and there is also the issue of how many bits were used originally cause the original ones may not have been recorded with 16 bits but with 8, I just don't know but what I do know is that 22 Khz 16 bit mono sound file format (in which they are recorded at the moment) sounds way better than that and I'm afraid that the only way to fix the sound quality problem is to recreate all the sounds again or at least recreate all the worst ones (lots of them).
So if anybody has expertise in generating cool synthesizer sounds for the program and has the interest in making the program better maybe they should contact the LBreakout people to see if they are interested in help in that area.
Another thing is that despite the graphics are acceptable I think that they are kinda dated and need a refresh. I think that the game is good enough to deserve better graphics and that with newer graphics it would look much cooler.
Also it is imperative in my opinion that a feature of adjusting mouse sensitivity is added to the program cause with some rodents it is kinda hard to play and that's to bad cause it is still a very good game.
Anyway one has to credit the creator of this game and the people that maintain it for all the effort in making it and making it such a good game.
for the long and insightful post.
The sound issue came up back in the testing phase and I thought we had it sorted out. Nevertheless there is a new version where it is fixed according to the changelog. I just need to find someone willing to compile it from source
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
What do you mean that the sound issue has been fixed, do you mean that the program has been changed/improved or that the .wav sound samples have been changed/improved or both?
You would have to improve the samples. I don't know how you could improve an upsampled sound file.
SWAG
That is what I mean. It doesn't matter what improvements are done to the program if the samples are screwed up, if they are the game will still sound bad and I know that the samples are screwed up cause I checked them in several different programs and they sounded poor in all of them so the sound generator of the program could actually be creating pretty good sound at the moment and the problem could be entirely in the samples and they will have to be recreated in order to truly fix this problem.
That is what I mean about the analysis graphs of the samples in Adobe Sound Booth CS4 looking broken (intermittent) indicating the up-sampling problem.
That's why I think that the only way to really solve it is to create new high quality samples for the game and I wonder if the game could play samples of even higher quality than 22 khz like 44.1 khz (CD quality) for example cause it is entirely possible that the program is capable already of doing that and modern computers (or pretty old ones at the moment) could play a 44.1 khz sampling rate file with ease but I don't know if the game could play higher quality samples, I haven't tried that.
Anyway even at 22 khz if the samples are created with good quality it will sound way better than with those old ones for sure.
It's the samples cause I tested it by substituting the exp.wav sample for another sound (a completely different one) that I downloaded from a free .wav files site.
So I took this different sample and renamed it exp.wav and stored the old exp.wav file that came with the software in another temporary directory then I put this new sound with the same name in the program sounds directory and when I played the game the exp.wav sample sounded nice without any crackling.
And then guess what? The sample that I used was a 44.1 khz mono sample and it played it just fine. The thing is that this may be an alternative but at a higher sampling rate the file sizes are going to be a little higher if it is used.
Bottom line is that it sounded much better, the main problem here (or the only problem) is with the quality of the samples. The sounds will have to be recreated to fix the sound of the program.
the changelog of version 2.6.1 reads:
I copied them from the source files I downloaded over to my install but it didn't sound very differently.
We already had a discussion about LBreakout2's sound quality here. Back then I increased the buffer size and it sounded better.
But maybe its still not as good as it could be and the best would be to create new sound files.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
its good to see my request is alive and well ^____^
Trust me, if the sound samples are recreated it will sound much better. The improvements in the program in the sound part are OK but if the samples are remade it will sound way better.
I tested it and the program is already capable of producing much better quality sounds, it is just that the old samples are holding it back, a lot.
There is potential here and I may do further tests and experiments if the time allows it.
There is also the issue that the new samples do not have to be equal to the older ones. It is possible to create a sound set with completely different sounds and it may be possible to create alternate sets to make the program sound the way you like cause it is easy to do sort of the way you customize skins in other programs or sounds of the operating system.
Too bad that the program itself doesn't have support for this but it could be relatively easy to add this capability to use alternate sound packs with it but let's just worry about getting a new higher quality sound sample set first of course then we could talk more about fancy things, ja,ja,ja.
Sounds like we have a volunteer!