Weeds, heading off into them

I've been on a big DClient kick the last few days, with intent to get a new 0.983 release out probably by this weekend, and a 1.0 'official' release by January. I'd managed to pare down the feature list and clean up a number of niggling bugs.

This morning when I woke up, I knew I wanted to do DClient work. But I couldn't quite recall what I was supposed to work on, and before I could look it up my brain spotted a nice looking patch of weeds and headed into them, full steam ahead.

Instead of working on the newbie 'demo mode' of the client, I somehow ended up working on audio. I've been avoiding sound and audio for months now, yet for some reason I decided today was a good day to do it. It took me about four hours, but I've got audio working on my Linux dev machine, and I implemented a full mixing stack as well to allow an arbitrary number of sounds to play simultaneously.

The only problem is, now that I can play audio, what do I do with it? The initial implementation pretty much only does one thing: it plays a short algorithmically generated 'click' whenever a command is sent to the server. While great for testing, it doesn't really add to the gameplay experience.

Now I have to find both ambient background music as well as triggered audio samples for various events. I'll also have to get the audio layer working on Windows, which could take anywhere from a couple of hours to several days.