feIikMonths ago I had minimal knowledge on audio in the Source Engine:
https://github.com/SylveonBottle/optimization/blob/070994049611003a51d09fac0ba3d7e5029a2783/TF2/base.cfg#L107
As you can see, it has been set at that value for a long while.
Despite me looking over a bunch of other convar changes I did, I didn't do so relating to audio.
So now I have.
This is what my research on the convar led me to:Values other than 0 add a delay to the changing of soundscapes within maps, that delay is longer for the same given value if the FPS is lower. (Soundscapes are the enviromental sounds baked into a map.) How you can tell if the soundscapes are delayed for too long is if previous soundscapes get stuck, then jump to silence, then to the newest soundscape. I've found that nothing is wrong with the changing of soundscapes when the value is set to 2, even while using fps_max 30. If you want to test this for yourself, set snd_spatialize_roundrobin at 10 to delay, 0 to remove the delay. Optional: Set soundscape_debug to 1 to see the soundscapes, once a line turns green, the soundscape has changed.
I'll be looking into the other audio changes I've done after the Pyro update release.
As for my next release, which nobody asked about but I feel the need to talk about it, will be alot cleaner and the autoexec might actually be easy to read.
Other things to note are some corrections not related to audio, new cfgs that I've finished already (lowram.cfg, weakgpu.cfg, some others), and performance improvements to cfgs I've never touched in a long while.
This doesn't just affect soundscapes, it affects all sounds, and affects the delay in terms of frames per second, so of course when your framerate is lower, it will take more time in seconds. If you are running at 60FPS, with snd_spatialize_roundrobin 5, you are spatializing sound every 32 frames, or about 0.5 seconds. This means, for example, if you hear a spy decloak behind you and turn around, you will still hear the decloaking sound behind you even though you are now facing the spy. Setting the CVar this high is like settting fov_desired to 70 for performance's sake.
JarateKingfelikShout out to mastercoms for raising awareness of ... the ability to use configs while in the custom folder.I would still install cfgs to the dedicated cfg folder. When the game loads any resource (and it loads tons) it has to manually check every single folder in custom if they have that file. When you have multiple folders in custom, it becomes a substantial hit to loadtime speed, even if the folders are completely empty. And it's especially bad nowadays since the game will reload all materials when you enter a server (at least as of the last time I tested) so you're going to be going through this process hundreds of times every time you enter a map.
That's why it's best to use vpk's wherever possible (only real exception is huds because fonts don't load from within vpk's + customization is easier in a folder) because they don't have this problem, but with cfg's you can ignore the issue entirely and just put them in the cfg folder.
But then you can't use dxsupport_override.cfg which has some noticeable particle and sound performance improvements, especially on DX9.