Doomsday Engine

It is my understanding that if a user tries to launch Dday with a number of sound channels greater than what their system has, that Dday would adjust accordingly.

Thus I thought that a big part of the logic for this, was sort of already there?

That Deng team could even set the default to 256 to basically achieve this, without having to write new algorithm?

There are actually two, separate limits:

• Doomsday's own logical sound channels, controlled with "-sfxchan"
• A possible hardware limitation of the chosen audio driver (e.g., 3D sounds)

In practice, though, modern audio systems like FMOD support a virtually unlimited number of audio channels. Consequently, the only questions are:

1. Are there performance implications of using a larger number of channels? (for instance maps with tons of objects)
2. Are there behavioral issues arising from too many sounds being allowed? (if in some scenario one has relied on a limited number of channels)

To follow up on this; I personally am not aware of any mod that relied on Vanilla Doom's limit (8) or Doomsday's current default (16) or its former max values (32, then 64 and now 256).

I wager there probably isn't any mod out there that leans on expecting X number of channels, simply because there is too much randomness with anything game environment even slightly dynamic.

But I will say that the in engine sound channel information display can only fit 16 on the screen; any more go off the bottom (IIRC the top of 17 is just about visible) of the screen, though that is a visual only issue with the table.

I've always set Dday's sound channel limit to maximum and never personally ran into any performance issues.