Hi Dark, It is not so much I'm particularly worried about people upgrading their version of DirectX as much as convenience for the end user here. During my previous game releases of Final Conflict, Montezuma's Revenge, and Mysteries of the Ancients the number one technical support issue and complaint was that the game installs were too complicated and confusing. Often they made mistakes like installing a DirectX upgrade before installing .NET which resulted in some missing libraries and broken compatibility issues. Another common complaint was the size of the files they needed to download to get my games to run. They had to download a huge .NET Framework upgrade, a huge DirectX upgrade,install them, and then download/install my games. A lot of people wanted me to just make it so they could download and install it without the hastle of downloading and installing this or that extra upgrade too. So one of the primary purposes of switching to C++ was to not only simplify the install, but to take all the guess work and confusion out of the install by using common Windows components that should be already present on the end user's machine. Now obviously if I go with XAudio2 Windows 7 already has this library installed, and upgrading is more or less optional if you want updates and bug fixes. On Windows XP you'll likely have to run a DirectX update to get XAudio2 as it isn't a core part of the Windows XP operating system by default. Though running the DirectX update tool can fix that easy enough.So like i said part of my concern here is simple convenience as well as technical concerns. DirectSound 8 comes with XP, Vista, and Windows 7 so installing extra components or upgrades are not necessary. With XAudio2 you may very well have to run a DirectX upgrade if your directX isn't very current.Plus XAudio2 is under active development so a version released a year ago isn't necessarily going to be as stable or bug free as the current release. So it is probably a good idea that the customer installs the latest DirectX upgrades anyway to make sure any patches or bug fixes are applied. I was sort of hoping to save some end users that extra step. Although, convenience aside XAudio2 does look like a superior audio API. As has already been mentioned on list numerous times it is fairly new, but has a lot going for it. It was designed for a modern PC and Windows operating system and can take advantage of the higher end sound cards, processors, and has a much more advanced software mixer that allows a developer to do things not possible with DirectSound. Here is a case in point. As i understand it with XAudio2 you are able to mix sounds, sound sources, in such a way that you can create truly unique and incredably realistic sound effects on the fly. Let's take a game like Final Conflict as our example here. When you destroy a starship with DirectSound you can either play a single static explosion effect, randomly select from a list of explosion sounds, or load multiple sounds into sound buffers and play them together. With XAudio2, as i understand it, you can remix those sounds in a way to dinamically create your own unique explosion from multiple sound sources. You can randomize it so no two explosions sound exactly the same. Plus you can apply custom DSP effects further adding a bit of realism or unique flavor to the audio output. I'm not too clear on all the specifics on how this is done, but it does certainly seam like a superior audio API for sure. XAudio2 is to us what Direct 3D graphics is to the mainstream video game market. However, given the fact it is a very new and practically an untested API from my end I'd like to have some end user experiences with it before proceeding with supporting something I know little to nothing about personally.
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