[Dev] A problem with sound assets and deserialization

[James Paige]

Hmmm... you know, in spite of all my little fixes to get Customer 
Service ROBOT! to run on systems with no sound card available, it is 
*still* failing :(

A closer look at the backtrace from the py2exe version suggests that I 
am actually crashing as a pickled SoundAsset is deserialized. My 
previous fixes caused a dummy pygame sound to be created when a 
SoundAsset was initialized, but unless I am going crazy, it seems that 
if you are on a machine with no sound and you deserialize a sound that 
was serialized on a machine where sound was working, you get a crash :(

Also, may I note that I am alarmed at how often I am running into this. 
I shouldn't be running into this many different diverse computers with 
totally broken sound support :(

On Windows it is generally a case of "Last Time I had to Reinstall 
Windows Because of a Virus Or Something I Couldn't Find the Recovery CD 
That Came With My Computer So My Sound Doens't Work Anymore"

On Linux it is generally a case of "To Preserve The Internal Purity Of 
Linuxness All Software Must Convert To Using PulseAudio, What Is That 
You Say? Make PulseAudio Backwards Compatable With OSS ALSA ESD And All 
The Other APIs That People Actually User For Everything? Sure! Use 
These Confusing And Unreliable Command-Line Tools! What? You Want It To 
be Transparently Backwards Compatable? No! If Software That Doesn't Use 
PulseAudio Directly Isn't Painfully Awkward To Use Then What Incentive 
Will The Developers Have To Upgrade Their Packages To Use PulseAudio 
Natively? You Non-Absolutist Non-Purist Heretic!"

---
James Paige