[Openal-devel] Some questions....

[Garin Hiebert]

> Imagine a game like Quake. If the source that plays the background music
> is killed just because you shoot... well thats bad. If you don't hear
> someone walking behind you because something exploded elsewhere... isn't
> very good either.
>
> It would be nice to cope such situation nicely. Is there any way to do
> that without priorities ?

An example -- the Unreal engine handles such priorities very well using
the OpenAL libraries as they are today.  It does that by having a level of
abstraction at a higher level than OpenAL which handles the individual
priorities of each sound and decides how to use the avialable sources. 
The Unreal audio engine itself is in the best possible position to
understand how the available sources should be used, because it was
written to accomodate the overall application.  Because of the individual
properties of the "soundtrack" and the "person walking behind you," they
will play in preference to lower-priority sounds.

Other applications will have other needs.  For instance, an application
for multi-track mixing and playback will have an entirely different scheme
for source allocation, also at a level of abstraction at least one level
_higher_ than OpenAL.

Garin