Hi Dark, Well, thanks to some advice given by Davy Kager I definitely think I'm going to give XAudio2 a try. He's been doing some experimentation and development with XAudio2, and from what he said XAudio2 really has some outstanding features. The one issue that really grabbed my attention was the way XAudio2 can perform pitch changes verses the way it is done in DirectSound. For example, in DirectSound if you try to increase the pitch of a car's engine sound from an idle up to a very fast speed like a speeding car, DirectSound will eventually start to distort the sound of the engine which is not cool. With XAudio2 you can change the pitch of the engine up 10 octives very rapidly and not get a lick of distortion. That's pretty impressive, and would resolve an issue I'm having with Raceway. Another issue David Greenwood and I were discussing on the developers list is how 3d audio is rendered on Windows Vista and Windows 7 verses Windows XP. When you play a game like Shades of Doom on Vista, for example, instead of a sound coming out of your left ear it gets positioned at a 45 degree angle off center. This obviously screws up the audio environment completely, and I think is do to the fact Windows Vista has a totally different sound mixer than XP, and no longer renders 3d audio positioning the same way as earlier releases of Windows at least with DirectSound. Neither of us are sure, but the solution with this problem may depend on going with XAudio2 instead of using DirectSound. After all, XAudio2 was specifically designed for Windows Vista and later in mind, and I'm certain Microsoft would have noticed this problem and tried to correct it with XAudio2. If so XAudio2 would be the smart choice since I am running Windows 7 here, and all of my games that have 3d audio environments using DirectSound are completely screwed up and aren't rendered properly. Since 3d FPS games are what Genesis is designed for anything that can correctly render 3d audio environments on Windows Vista and Windows 7 hands down is the most sensable choice. As far as my feelings about installing dependencies goes I agree if a customer isn't able to install required Windows updates that is tough luck. However, as the developer of said game it often falls upon me, through technical support services, to help them perform the updates , and I really would prefer not to have to hand hold new computer users through the installation of DirectX and other Windows components if I don't have to. Never-the-less as XAudio2 seams to be the better solution here I consider DirectX updates a necessity to take advantage of improved audio support. Plus as I've said before for users switching to Windows 7 XAudio2 could be the difference between a incorrectly rendered and a correctly rendered 3d audio environment which makes updating DirectX worth while. So thanks to some technical discussion on the developers list XAudio2 sounds like a better solution all around so far.
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