5.1 surround sound FTW!

[dunk2k]

Hi all,

I've been following the development roadmap for 2.2.4 since 2.2.3 came out.

Have noticed that ticket #925 (http://developer.wz2100.net/ticket/925) has been put back to development of 2.2.5

Id like to say that using OpenAL to render 5.1 sound for Warzone 2100 would be fantastic!
I myself, and im sure other windows users do, have a Creative X-fi soundcard. The benefit to having one of these soundcards and a game that uses OpenAL as its sound API is that the card can mix the sound source to full surround sound regardless the speaker config. I myself use headphones and using my soundcard, i can get full surround sound on my headphones thanks to OpenAL.
Even those with a 2.1, 5.1, 6.1 or 7.1 surround speaker system without a creative soundcard would hear the benfit if the surround sound where to be implemented and released into the game. Subwoofers (which is the .1) would certainly give the explosions a more definded audial impact.

This would add so much more depth to the game, players could hear enemy arty fire before a sensor/CB sensor informs the player of where its coming from, or even hear fire coming out of fog of war. Incoming VTOL's would screech past the player like a jet fighter does in real life.

I hope other players share this interest in this development, ive found sound postitioning to be just as important, if not more, in gaming as having a stable graphics platform.

Id be willing to use my computer rig as a guinea pig to help the dev team test out any OpenAL surround sound implementations/builds

Spec (as of 14/10/09):
O/S- Vista 64bit Home Premium SP2
CPU- Intel E8600 @ 4 Ghz
GPU- 2x ATI 4870 X2
RAM- 4GB DDR3 @ 1600 Mhz
Soundcard - Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro
# OpenAL32.dll- version 6.14.357.24
# wrap_oal.dll- version 2.2.0.5

Please, if anyone else seems interested in having this in the game, please give this thread a quick bump

regards,
dunk2k

[-Kosh-]

Too bad only creative cards support this in vista and windows 7.

[dunk2k]

the surround feature of the creative x-fi cards is also present in windows XP.

Those without a creative x-fi card but have a surround speaker system would still be able to get surround sound because openAL would get the speaker config from the operating system and render the sound appropriately.

[Terminator]

5.1 - It would be great IMHO.

[-Kosh-]

the surround feature of the creative x-fi cards is also present in windows XP.

Those without a creative x-fi card but have a surround speaker system would still be able to get surround sound because openAL would get the speaker config from the operating system and render the sound appropriately.

I do not think that is the case for vista & win7.
The driver must support openAL since of the f'ing change MS did in the name of DRM.

There are a couple of things going on here ...

- Multi-speaker output is not available on all OpenAL devices. The
'Generic Hardware' and 'native' X-Fi and Audigy devices support
multi-speaker output (and play multi-channel Buffers). The 'Generic
Software' device is stereo only (you can play 5.1 Buffers, but they will be
downmixed to stereo)

- On Window Vista, Microsoft removed the 'Hardware Abstraction Layer' which
means that DirectSound3D can no longer be hardware accelerated by a
soundcard. This means that the OpenAL device 'Generic Hardware' which uses
DirectSound3D Hardware Buffers no longer functions on Vista.

This means that if you don't have a soundcard with a 'native' AL Device
then you won't get multi-speaker output on Windows Vista.

[dunk2k]

Lovely bits of information there Kosh, some i already knew about.

Now, would you be as so kind as to list the multi-speaker abled soundcards that run in Vista that do not have a 'native' AL Device.

[Buginator]

Lovely bits of information there Kosh, some i already knew about.

Now, would you be as so kind as to list the multi-speaker abled soundcards that run in Vista that do not have a 'native' AL Device.

How would he know that?

For what it is worth, I added more debugging info so we can see what people have... too bad that only shows up in either --debug all or when someone crashes, and uploads the warzone2100.rpt file to us.

[i-NoD]

Seems like I've found a simple workaround for the problem (At least for my laptop with radeon 4650 hdmi connection which somehow can transmit 7.1 LPCM sound but doesn't expose ANY devices to Creative OpenAL beside stereo-only 'Generic Software'). There is a OpenAL Soft implementation of OpenAL. Download windows binary, rename 'soft_oal.dll' to OpenAL32.dll and place it beside warzone executable. This SHOULD(not 100%) make 'DirectSound Sofware' device default (it's in turn is configured by system sound manager, just set 5.1 or 7.1 sound).

[Buginator]

Seems like I've found a simple workaround for the problem (At least for my laptop with radeon 4650 hdmi connection which somehow can transmit 7.1 LPCM sound but doesn't expose ANY devices to Creative OpenAL beside stereo-only 'Generic Software'). There is a OpenAL Soft implementation of OpenAL. Download windows binary, rename 'soft_oal.dll' to OpenAL32.dll and place it beside warzone executable. This SHOULD(not 100%) make 'DirectSound Sofware' device default (it's in turn is configured by system sound manager, just set 5.1 or 7.1 sound).

For what it is worth, I am experimenting with openAL-soft on windows, there should be a new update to 1.10 soon.

[i-NoD]

We could include OpenAL Soft library as an option for Windows installer. But still use Creative version by default.