Sound Crackling/Breaking-Up - makes the game pretty grim to play...

[johnpeat]

PC is Windows7 64bit - AMD 240 (2.9ghz Dual Core) with 4GB RAM and an 5670 (512Mb) - Sound is onboard Realtek HD Audio.

Tidalis is the Steam version if that makes a difference.

There is a known issue with this soundchip when playing fullscreen video (you'll get a bit of sound breakup with some videos - newer drivers seem to reduce this but don't totally eliminate it) but I've never seen it in a game before - and NEVER in a non-fullscreen application and never so bad as it is in Tidalis.

Sound break-up  is constant when playing (in-game sound and music) - turning-off the music (Vol 0) doesn't help (the in-game sound breaks-up just as badly)

Happens in fullscreen (tried several different resolutions) and Windowed (and as I said above I've NEVER run into this problem with non-fullscreen apps).

Any ideas - it kinda makes the game rather grating to play??

[x4000]

That is very unfortunate indeed -- we've never run into that before, and don't have any other reports of that.  There apparently were some issues with Unity 3D (the game engine that Tidalis runs on) doing that on some hardware, but largely that was pre-2.6.  Tidalis is currently running on 2.61 of Unity.  In the next couple of weeks we'll be upgrading it to the newly-released Unity 3.0, which will have numerous benefits for Tidalis, but I don't know if the audio playback issue you're seeing will be one of them.

My main suggestion would of course be to check the sound drivers, which it sounds like you've already done; beyond that, about the only thing we can do is the upgrade to Unity 3.0, which is coming in the next few weeks, anyway.  I really hate that, but that's one of the drawbacks of using someone else's engine (weighed against the many, many benefits).  Sorry about that, hopefully that is of some help at least. 

[johnpeat]

I'm using the drivers direct from Realtek (as the mobo supported drivers are almost a year old now) but I also tried uninstalling them entirely and relying on the MS drivers built-into W7 (which seem to have more issues with fullscreen video) and it's the same in both cases.

Interesting you should be using Unity tho - I've had Unity installed on this PC and (you guessed it!) I had a load of trouble with sound breakup...

What I'll do for now is put Tidalis onto my laptop - should work AOK there for the time being...

[x4000]

Ah, that sounds consistent then, at least.  I suspect it may be related to OpenAL that Unity is using, not sure.  On the Mac they are using FMod, but on the windows side I think not.  Hopefully either Realtek will issue a fix, or Unity will make (or has already made in 3.0) some improvements.  Fingers crossed!  Glad that the laptop is a valid recourse for the moment, at least.