Anyone going to use OpenAL as defaul instead of ..
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/Anyone going to use OpenAL as defaul instead of ..
| ||
| FreeAudio? I am, because FreeAudio seems to have a buffer delay on many systems that means sounds can seem out of sync with on screen action. Now that OpenAL has had a recent bug fix by BRL, it seems the best option to me because it has no lag and it's safe of Vista (FreeAudio isn't). Direct sound is noisy and horrible (but not lag) we all agree. Must be noted that I am use OpenAL Generic Software so that I can have lots of channels of crappy sounds cards as advised by GfK. Anyone else going this route? |
| ||
| The trouble with OpenAL is that you need to supply the DLL for anything pre-Vista, as this doesn't come installed as default, as it does on Vista. So, I'm still going to be using FreeAudio on pre-Vista set-ups, and OpenAL (Generic Software) on Vista. |
| ||
| The trouble with OpenAL is that you need to supply the DLL for anything pre-Vista That's not much of a problem - it compresses down to about 250k. |
| ||
| Yup. |
| ||
| Yeah I'm gonna distribute it (is that legal, anyone know?) |
| ||
| I see Torque Game Engine carries with it, and OpenAL is LGPL based, shouldn't be problem if you credit it in doc. |
| ||
| cool. I guess I need to find the license so I can see how they want it credited, |
| ||
| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License |
| ||
| cool but I don't understand it :-) Basically I need to distribute it with a commercial game and wonder if I should credit it in a readme file or something? |
| ||
| Me either! :) The way I understand it you would only need to credit it and provide the source code if you're distributing a derivative work of OpenAL - which we aren't, we're just using the DLLs without modification. [edit] I'm drawing a complete blank here. Anybody have any definitive answers on this? |
| ||
| I've just posted about the licence issue on indiegamer, and also on the openAL mailing lists. See what happens. |
| ||
| You can distribute the DLL legally, but you cannot pack the DLL into an EXE as far as I know, as that may or may not be interpreted as static linking. Credit is not necessary -- inclusion of the license or specifying that the DLL is licensed under the LGPL may be. Also, a link to the IndieGamer post would be good. |
| ||
| http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=10938 |
| ||
| on vista this is all I get on my machine: OpenAL FreeAudio FreeAudio Multimedia FreeAudio DirectSound DirectSound Null as you can see there I don't get a "OpenAL Generic Software"... the OpenAL works but has the channel limitations that have been listed elsewhere so that won't work for my game. Any ideas where that Software driver is? |
| ||
| Call EnableOpenALAudio() first. |
| ||
| thanks, that did it! |
| ||
| Noel: OK thx, very interesting. GfK: I'll checkout the indiegamer post |
| ||
| Ok, I played around with the sound driver options on vista. "OpenAL Generic Software" seemed at first that it would work but I get sounds that break up and sometimes don't even play. Also I was originally using CueSound to allocate and save a channel but that was erroring out so I had to override CueSound with a function that just returned AllocChannel(). Anyway, on my machine I seemed to be able to use the "FreeAudio DirectSound" just fine (no errors or delays) on this computer which uses the on board sound from the asus striker extreme. has anybody had any issues with "FreeAudio DirectSound" on vista? edit: ok "DirectSound" works fine too if I don't count on CueSound to allocate the channel while CueSound worked just fine with "FreeAudio DirectSound". so to summarize, openAl doesn't work correctly on my vista machine so I think I'm going to go with FreeAudio on linux/os x, and either FreeAudio Directsound or DirectSound on vista... any comments with that plan? |
| ||
| This seems to be the opposite of what I've heard so far. Also it's called just "FreeAudio" not "FreeAudio DirectSound" because "DirectSound" is the Microsoft sound driver. |
| ||
| Grey, there is also a "FreeAudio DirectSound" audio driver as well as "DirectSound". Anyway, "FreeAudio DirectSound", when it was first developed, ran into crackly sound issues. I couldn't say for sure how it works on my system now. I'll have to check later, as I'm at work now. The "DirectSound" driver works fine on my system, but like Grey has mentioned, others have experienced problems, so I now default to the "OpenAL Generic Software" driver. I do allow a user to change it if they want, particularly as "DirectSound" is the best of the lot on my system. |
| ||
| FreeAudio DirectSound uses software mixing not hardware mixing like Mark's brl.directsound so can apparently suffer from some major lag with some Vista systems. |
| ||
| Grey, there is also a "FreeAudio DirectSound" audio driver as well as "DirectSound". Oh I never knew that, it doesn't appear in my list of sound drivers, weird. (unless I missed it when I looked a couple of weeks back, haven't got the code handy to check again).Skidracer: Doesn't OpenAL Generic Software also use software mixing? But it doesn't have lags on Vista. Must be the way FreeAudio is coded I guess... |
| ||
| Right, whatever... Just to be quite clear, I think you should follow marks lead and use brl.directsound as your default and maybe give your users the option to change drivers. He should know, his vista box was a hell of a lot harder to please than mine. |
| ||
| Did I offend somehow? hmm so the official word is use DirectSound then? It's quite noisy and makes crackles sometimes even on XP, that's why OpenAL was prefered. If FreeAudio didn't have the lag, it would have probably been the driver of choise. |
| ||
| Heh, yeah, looks like he was grumpy there!? |
| ||
| Now I am confused on what to use. I thought Default FreeAudio was what everyone is supposed to use for best compatibility/performance across all platforms, except when Vista was detected then OpenAL was preferred. |
| ||
| me too but OpenAL doesn't work well on my system but both "FreeAudio DirectSound" and "DirectSound" work fine... it seems from that "audio IV" thread and from skid that DirectSound should be the default at least on Vista. hmmm I only have access to 1 vista box so I can't really test it.... I do have plenty of winxp and macs to test on though. I think I might wrap up a little demo of what I'm playing with now so people can test the sound options... |
| ||
| http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=68886 Don't know when BRL will try to put up a streaming solution... current audio system is way too crappy.... |
| ||
| dmaz: what is the "audio IV" thread? Yeah basically I assumed FreeAudio was the best as it was default but it's got a major lag on Vista and a minor lag on all other PCs (lag length varies). Also I've had the sound break up on WinME and Win98. So I thought, OK I'll use OpenAL for Vista and maybe for 98/ME. It had a channel bug which I notified BRL about and Mark fixed recently so it seemed viable. But now I hear about problems with it. In fact today (and this may be unrelated) I was doing some testing of my current game using OpenAL Generic Software and I got several channels simply not playing any sounds. Weird. Not sure if this is a bug in my game yet BUT I haven't altered the sound code in months... Also OpenAL did have broken sounds on WinME occasionally and one of my team members is reporting problems. Sigh. DirectSound is just loud and noisy (you can heard hisses etc) and it seems that the first sample played often crackles at the beginning on my PC. Perhaps it's the only option though. As for Macs, what are people using on Macs please? (OSX) FreeAudio? Is there a lag or breaking up sounds or is it fine? |
| ||
| @yoko, look nice but I don't see any panning or depth support... and I was kind of hoping to stay away from including a dll or something. in "blitzmax module tweaks"... it was a series of threads about the new openal support that Mark and company added. http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=67637#763236 on the Macs I haven't heard any bad things about FreeAudio. at one point I wanted some graphical effects from music especially on the title screen so I was thinking about using FMOD... I'll have to see what people report with this demo I'll release. |
   |