Sounds playing after game has been closed.
lhvwb
Australia Join Date: 2013-10-31 Member: 188884Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Australia Join Date: 2013-10-31 Member: 188884Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Someone running NS2 on Windows (I run on Linux), mentioned that their pc was playing sounds from NS2 after they had closed the game (since the latest patch). I also experienced this issue running under Linux with pulseaudio.
In detail, I played NS2 for a few hours (on Linux with pulseaudio) before closing it and doing other things. Some time after closing NS2 (about 15 mins, so not immediately), I started hearing various NS2 sounds, such as shooting, axing, biting, music, walking, and even talking which sounded like voice communication. It sounds like I'm spectating/playing a game of NS2. Pulseaudio reports that the sound is being produced by the "chromium" application, however closing all processes related to chromium does not stop the audio, which suggests that it is not related to the problem. Closing steam does stop the sounds from playing. Running steam again is fine, however if I open up NS2 and join a server the sound starts again, still apparently from "chromium", in addition to normal NS2 sound from the ALSA plugin which NS2 uses to play sound using pulseaudio on linux. Restarting my audio server - pulseaudio - appears to have stopped the sounds from occurring when I run NS2 again.
So far it has not happened again, although since someone else reported similar issues I thought I'ld mention them here in case others have a similar problem. It's rather annoying and distracting to hear what sounds like an entire NS2 game playing when the game itself is closed, although I can mute it. I will do some debugging and report further if it occurs again. My first guess was that NS2 or a mod (I had played on Diamond gamers which has so many mods) had opened some hidden steam window playing a video, although I did not see any relevant processes.
In detail, I played NS2 for a few hours (on Linux with pulseaudio) before closing it and doing other things. Some time after closing NS2 (about 15 mins, so not immediately), I started hearing various NS2 sounds, such as shooting, axing, biting, music, walking, and even talking which sounded like voice communication. It sounds like I'm spectating/playing a game of NS2. Pulseaudio reports that the sound is being produced by the "chromium" application, however closing all processes related to chromium does not stop the audio, which suggests that it is not related to the problem. Closing steam does stop the sounds from playing. Running steam again is fine, however if I open up NS2 and join a server the sound starts again, still apparently from "chromium", in addition to normal NS2 sound from the ALSA plugin which NS2 uses to play sound using pulseaudio on linux. Restarting my audio server - pulseaudio - appears to have stopped the sounds from occurring when I run NS2 again.
So far it has not happened again, although since someone else reported similar issues I thought I'ld mention them here in case others have a similar problem. It's rather annoying and distracting to hear what sounds like an entire NS2 game playing when the game itself is closed, although I can mute it. I will do some debugging and report further if it occurs again. My first guess was that NS2 or a mod (I had played on Diamond gamers which has so many mods) had opened some hidden steam window playing a video, although I did not see any relevant processes.
Comments
thanks for reporting this issue.
Could you maybe get us a record of that sound and check if there are any fmod threads still running when this happens. I would actually guess it's the steam web helper we use for in-game HTML rendering so maybe also try to see if terminating that process stops the sound.
I also opened a ticket at our bug tracker and assigned remi (who last worked at the html renderer) to it
And to make it even spookier: I had not even played the game today, it happened 5 minutes after booting the PC. I heard sounds like I was spectating a game, but I could not find the source! No browser open, and in Steam there was only the friends list and the library open. NS2 was still on the beta branch from last Monday's PT. It stopped after I killed Steam.
Could it be steam streaming went wild o.O . Would be great if we could confirm if it has something to do with ns2 or steam itself.
My guess is that somehow NS2 is playing a bunch of audio files located in it's game folder in some consistent order, although it would be good if someone could confirm that there are in fact audio files matching those described located in NS2.
As previously mentioned I cannot see any NS2 processes open ("ps -A | grep ns2" returns nothing, although I might be missing a thread), again there were a number of steam related processes none of which seem related, unfortunately I managed to kill steam by killing steamwebhelper processes while seeing if it was any of them, which meant that I had to restart steam, then my NS2 audio bugged so I had to restart pulseaudio and the tutorial sound is no longer playing. I'll post a list of processes next time it happens.
(Side note: NS2 audio bugging is due to a different issue, likely related to the fact that I'm running on a linux distro with a newer pulseaudio/alsa version to the one provided by SteamOS and Ubuntu. Occasionally when playing NS2 the alsa plugin for pulseaudio loses connction to the pulseaudio server, while I can see it trying to reconnect using a tool such as pavucontrol it will drop almost immediately , resulting in distorted sound from NS2, this continues even after restarting NS2. Only restarting pulseaudio appears to fix this. This is likely a problem in the ALSA plugin, FMOD or even audio drivers rather than NS2 itself. )
Thanks for those details yeah it sound very much like the in-game html renderer doesn't get terminated correctly and continues to play you tube videos etc. .
Following is output of all children of the initial steam process 6286 from "ps -Al", don't worry too much about the first few processes as they are mostly bash scripts required to run steam and steam games within the user chroot required by my strange linux distribution. Process 8989, which was started well after the others is the offending process and it was not started while NS2 was running, consistent with reporting from others that NS2 doesn't even need to have been opened.
0 S 1000 6286 1 0 80 0 - 31227 wait ? 00:00:00 bash
0 S 1000 6289 6286 0 80 0 - 39398 wait ? 00:00:00 6dv60pfc3an6szf
4 S 1000 6292 6289 0 80 0 - 29529 wait ? 00:00:00 steam
0 S 1000 6316 6292 0 80 0 - 31335 wait ? 00:00:00 bash
0 S 1000 6317 6292 0 80 0 - 31182 pipe_w ? 00:00:00 tee
0 S 1000 6392 6316 1 80 0 - 104800 poll_s ? 00:00:20 steam
1 S 1000 6400 6392 0 80 0 - 35183 wait ? 00:00:00 steam
0 S 1000 6401 6400 0 80 0 - 132943 poll_s ? 00:00:02 steamwebhelper
0 S 1000 6404 6401 0 80 0 - 34504 poll_s ? 00:00:00 steamwebhelper
1 S 1000 6512 6404 0 80 0 - 71580 futex_ ? 00:00:00 steamwebhelper
1 S 1000 8989 6404 4 80 0 - 105482 futex_ ? 00:00:04 steamwebhelper
Could somebody who has this issue go in Steam to Help -> About Steam and post the built date of the used Steam client.
Afterwards it would be great if somebody could check if the issue gets resolved by the using the latest Steam Beta build (Steam -> Settings then hit the Change button in the Account tab and select the Steam Beta Update and click OK).
Also please provide a tech_support.zip if possible