Samples and sampleplayer best practices

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1

So I’m experimenting with adding sound effects in my game, and I thought I’d ask advice before going too deep into the rabbit hole.

So let’s take an example: I want 4 instances of the same sample to play at regular intervals, namely depth charges exploding around the U-boat. I like to change the volume and panning for each to suggest the explosions getting closer.

So my instinct is to create a sample object for the explosion sample and 4 sampleplayers at launch and keep them all in memory, in order to avoid object creation/flush. And then Call play() on each sampleplayer as needed. Obviously that means preloading all my sounds, which could lead to longer loading times and also filling the memory, since I love me samples in stereo.

Now for giggles I tried to create a local sampleplayer and call play() every time I have an explosion. I don’t have many explosions. 2 or 3 goups of 4 separated by 30 seconds, then a long time before that sequence happens again (it’s a turn based game).

To my surprise this showed no lag, and didn’t seem to affect memory. The obvious advantage is that I can save all that memory, loading each explosion only as needed. Now my understanding is that every time I create a local sampleplayer, the sample is loaded in memory, and then flushed. So would that affect battery consumption of the game over time? Would that cause any risk of memory leak or fragmentation, or performance degradation over time?

Basically my question is: the second method goes against my instincts but seems perfectly fine. Am I missing something? Is it okay to do that?

2

Afaik the sample and the sampleplayer are separate things in memory, so you can instantiate a bunch of sampleplayers that reference the same sample. I.e. just load the sample once and use a local player to play it the way you like.

On-demand loading might work fine too, but note that your sound won't actually play immediately as it has to be read from storage first. GC should take care of the trash after a short delay and stopped players only cost memory space.