SCI: PHANT2: Movies volume too low

[domino1983]

The volume for movies in the game is too low. Compared to DOSBox it feels like it's set to 50% though I've set it to 100%.
I'm using latest Win32 daily build.

[domino1983]

I'm able to set the movies volume to 100% using ScummVM sliders (ctrl-F5 - options) but then the music volume also goes up. I can't change movies amd music volume separately.

[csnover]

Thanks for your report!

Yeah, this is not great. I skipped all the videos when I was testing the game so did not notice this problematic sound level problem. Mixing was not great in the original game either, but it is worse here because the video volume shares volume control with the in-game volume in order to make sure that video volume is also adjusted whenever the game’s volume is adjusted from within ScummVM, so it is only possible to play videos more quietly than the in-game audio, not louder.

There are a couple options I can think of off the top of my head, I am not sure which is best or if there are some better alternatives (neither of these seems particularly great):

1. Add a hack to the video player so that it reduces the volume of other game audio whenever a video is playing, similar to games like Torin’s Passage where the volume of music is reduced whenever speech is playing.
2. Add a hack to the audio subsystem so that in-game audio (i.e. music and sound effects) is always played at a fixed lower volume than what is requested by the game. This would be roughly similar to the way the game sets its default volume levels, where the in-game audio defaults to being somewhat lower than the video volume, though this would be hard-coded in the engine code specifically for this game.

(A side-note about the in-game “music” volume slider: the game actually (intentionally) changes both the music and sound effects volumes when you use this control, despite its name.)

[domino1983]

I'm not sure if it helps, but the only way to play videos really loud and in the same time playing music quieter is:

1. Set the volume slider in ScummVM (ctrl-F5 - options) to max. No matter which one, because they all move together.
2. Set the music volume in game menu to lower level.

I had to repeat this process a few times, because after some time the movies volume went low again.

[csnover]

Thanks for your report! A patch for this issue has been added in commit e137d01967021d8fceef45c727615c797a9cdd91 and will be available in daily builds 1.10.0git-4801 and later.

Please note that there was a bug in the DOS interpreter of Phantasmagoria 2 that caused in-game audio to be less loud than it was supposed to be. This bug didn’t exist in the Windows interpreter. ScummVM follows the correct behaviour of the Windows interpreter, so you may notice that audio mixes are not exactly the same as in DOSBox. This is expected. If there are still significant problems with dialogue audibility, please comment on this ticket and we can explore using the bad DOS volume control for this game instead.