Hi Shaun, Creating my own pan control wouldn't be very easy. I'd have to upgrade OpenAL, upgrade sfml-audio, and then update my engine using the new stereo pan control feature. Plus build new windows and Linux libraries for all of the above since this would be an unofficial update to OpenAL and SFML. Yeah, I could submit my changes to the maintainers for OpenAL and SFML, but who knows when the new packages would make it into the general package repositories for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and all the other Linux distributions out there. In other words Anyone who would want to play this game would have to absolutely be running my modified versions of OpenAL and SFML which defeats the purpose of using the mainstream stable releases of these APIs which are either installed with your distribution of Linux or are available in their extra package repositories. It would be like telling a Windows user that you have DirectX, but you have to install my custom version of DirectX instead to play this one game because it doesn't offer feature x. As it happens DirectX no longer has a pan control either if you use the XAudio2 library which ships with current builds of DirectX for XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Let's face it folks the day of using a basic stereo pan control is ancient history as far as game APIs are concerned. These days game developers, mainstream developers, all create games with high-end 3d audio with support for 5.1 and 7.1 sound cards. Simple 2d stereo panning is, to put it nicely, very old fassioned for mainstream game companies and developers. In the case they want a sort of 2d pan effect they simply pipe it through the 3d listener interface and emulate a pan effect that way. For us not having a smooth pan effect is a big issue because we use audio exclusively and totally depend on accurate rendering of the audio output. Were this a mainstream game I doubt the average gamer would notice. As long as the sound comes out of the left speaker, right speaker, or is center is all they care about. The could care less if it is 75% off center or 90% off center as long as the effect is close enough to sound "cool." I'm not justifying this in any way, shape, or form but am letting you know things are changing as far as game APIs are concerned. It doesn't matter if you use a free API like OpenAL or if you go out and purchase an expensive audio library like FMOD they are all more or less geared for 3d audio output. Nobody accept us really wants simple stereo panning it seams. For example, i can remember when Microsoft made their public announcement about XAudio2 for Windows Vista and the XBox.They wrote this huge article about all the cutting edge features in XAudio2, explained why it was superior to DirectSound,and how they had answered the mainstream cgame developers demand for improved 3d audio support for future Windows and XBox game titles. It seams in the rush to meet the demands of the mainstream game companies, who after all puts money in Microsoft's pocket to support their platforms, Microsoft decided to leave out anything they felt was too unimportant like stereo panning. So XAudio2 doesn't have it unless you write your own using their 3d audio interface. I'd imagine if Mac and Linux game developers felt a stereo pan control was important they would have added one already. However, as OpenAL doesn't have one I must assume the mainstream and private game developers for Mac and Linux feel one is unnecessary the same as everybody else does about XAudio2 and the other big name audio libraries out there.
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