Hi Thomas,
How does OpenAl handle 3d simulation with normal headphones? I found that to
be the main issue with the 3d rendering in DirectSound. It gave a very poor
experience for those who did not actually have a 5.1 setup which I do not,
and I believe most people will be using stereo either through headphones or
speakers. I have not yet tested the 3d functions of XAudio2, as I primarily
make sidescroller and adventure games. Like many others I get easily lost in
the full 3d fps titles, not so much because I am unable to hear where things
are located but more because I can never seem to figure out exactly how I'm
facing and how the passages twist and turn etc, and these have only really
been 2d games. Add yet another dimention and I have a feeling I'd be truly
lost. Lol.
I did look at OpenAl a few years ago before I decided to have Streemway
developed, but got discouraged by the fact that it could not be bundled in
with the game as far as I could gather at the time. The user had to run yet
another instalation package which made me decide to skip it.
Kind regards,
Philip Bennefall
----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas Ward" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>; "Gamers Discussion list" <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, March 07, 2011 2:07 PM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Seamlessly upgrading DirectX
Hi,
Yes and no. It is true that OpenAL doesn't come with a stereo pan
control, but I've read a few articles on how to essentually create
your own pan control provided you are wrapping OpenAL directly. Which
I wasn't doing around beta 14/beta 15.
When I was working on betas 14/15 I thought I would try my hand at
using an open source piece of middleware called SFML highly
recommended by a lister. As it turns out SFML is buggy on Windows XP,
and the audio API for SFML doesn't expose the complete OpenAL API.
That meant I had no way to extend OpenAL and add a pan control because
it wasn't accessing it directly. The way to get around that problem is
to write your own middleware like Streemway which wraps OpenAL and you
can add a custom pan control and any custom DSP effects you want.
OpenAL is a fairly decent audio library all things considered and I
think in time with some development and experimentation I can produce
something equal to XAudio2 and Streemway once I have a chanse to write
my own middleware API.
In the mean time I'm still using SFML 1.6 for the Linux versions of my
games and the panning isn't too bad using the 3d audio control. It
just takes a bit of math to try and make it pan cleanly. However,
where it really shines is 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound. Which is mainly
what I need anyway for my FPS games.
HTH
On 3/6/11, Philip Bennefall <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Thomas,
Also, with OpenAl wouldn't you be suffering from the inferior panning
control? Or rather, the lack of one. Granted XAudio2 doesn't have one
either, but as we've discussed it is perfectly possible to build one that
works exactly as in DirectSound which is what Streemway implements. You
still get all the 3d features, of course, as well as the ability to both
use
the provided effects and insert your own dsp code. Streemway exposes these
features, and so will BGT.
Kind regards,
Philip Bennefall
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