Hi Thomas, About compressed file types...I know that Direct Show supports MP3s. Does it only support Mpeg Layer 3 compression? Best Regards, Hayden
-----Original Message----- From: gamers-boun...@audyssey.org [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Ward Sent: Monday, March 22, 2010 1:02 AM To: Gamers Discussion list Subject: [Audyssey] DirectSound or XAudio Hi all, As most of you know I've spent the last three or four months converting my engine code from C# .NET to C++. At last after three/four months of hard work the engine is almost ready to begin using for building Mysteries of the Ancients beta 11. The one area of the engine I haven't quite completed though is the sound core. Initially I was using FMOD Ex 4.28, which is fine, but as you may know that requires a special license to use in commercial products. When incorperated into a game engine the license costs a lot more. I really don't have the money right now to pay for the license so I've been thinking about using DirectSound 8 or XAudio2.What I'm looking for is some educated advice which I should use for my engine. On one hand I know DirectSound 8 is old, is now technically moved to the legacy branch of DirectX, but it also is quite stable and very backwards compatible with older Windows releases. Plus Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 all come with it installed so no need to upgrade DirectX to use it. Thus if I go with DirectSound 8 I don't have to install anything extra, or ask anyone to upgrade DirectX. All of these things are compelling reasons for choosing DirectSound 8. On the other hand XAudio2 looks very promising. For one thing it is a lot newer, is designed for Windows releases beyond Windows 7, and is currently being supported by Microsoft. This means going with it now will save me some trouble upgrading my games when the time comes that DirectSound is officially removed from DirectX altogether, but nobody knows when that will be.Too many games and other multimedia products depend on DirectSound to just up and drop it as Microsoft well knows. They probably won't drop it completely until XAudio2 has fully replaced DirectSound for newer games and other multimedia products. So the fact that XAudio2 is current doesn't necessarily mean DirectSound is a bad option. It just means my games will be more up to date so to speak. However, as i said before there are some features that make it promising. For one thing I see according to the docs you can play and stream some compressed file types like wma and xwma. This is obviously a great feature as some music and ambience tracks can be quite big. Having support for some compressed file types makes it a good choice in that regard. Besides that XAudio2 has some improvements in DSP support and can be used to mix sounds for 5.1 and 7.1 sound cards which is very good since the fact we depend on an entire audio environment to begin with. The more realistic sounding the mixer is the more realistic the game's audio environment will be. However, even though a game may support such a high tech sound environment most of my customers are likely to be stuck with some budget sound card like a Soundmax AC-97 that shipped with their computer. So I'm not really certain that putting extra work into specifically supporting 5.1 or 7.1 mixing will do them a whole heck of a lot of good without the higher end hardware. If this is the case then Xaudio2 3d mixing won't be much better than DirectSound's 3d mixing if they don't have the equipment to take advantage of the better 3d mixing. Any thoughts here? Has anyone actually sat down and compared these two APIs and have a better list of pros and cons? More to the point which do you think I should pick? I can basically use either one right now, and I should be able to update the engine in a day or so once I figure out which to use for the project. Thanks. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gam...@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gam...@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
