[Openal-devel] openal-soft

[Lukasz Pawelczyk]

Chris Robinson wrote:
>> 1. Totally no sound in one old icculus port of a windows game.
> 
> Which game? Some extensions have been dropped (particularly those for playing 
> MP3 and Vorbis, and the callback extension), so if it relies on them, there 
> will be issues. I won't mind adding some of the extensions back, but ones 
> like the aforementioned likely won't.

Avp: http://www.icculus.org/avp/

Long time abandoned port, but still I find it amusing to play it 
sometimes. To run it you need some data files which can't be freely 
downloaded. If source code is not enough for you to check it let me know.

> You can try forcing the default alsa device to a hardware voice (by default it 
> uses the 'default' device, which is kinda touchy in what it does). You can 
> also try to enable full 4 or 5.1-channel mixing. Using OpenAL Soft 1.2, you 
> can create ~/.alsoftrc and add the lines:

I perfectly know all of this, I wouldn't dare to report rear speakers 
not working if I was using 2 channel device :-)
'default' and 'hw' devices in my case are 2 channel (emu10k1). I tested 
it on surround40 and my own 'default' definition (build on top of 
surround51 with headphones output made of center/lfe + softvol, posted 
in attachment). On both of it and original openal there is rear speakers 
sound, on soft one, only front ones are playing.

The game I'm talking about is BTRL: http://game-warden.com/bsg/

> [general]
> format = AL_FORMAT_QUAD16 # or AL_FORMAT_51CHN16 for 5.1

I got it set of course (the same way as I have speaker-num 4 for old 
openal).

>> Also it would be nice to make static version as well during compilation.
> So for instance you'd have ./myapp, ./myapp.x86, and ./lib/libopenal.so.1, and 
> have ./myapp be a shell script:
> 
> #!/bin/sh
> export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./lib:"$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
> ./myapp.x86 $@

I know this as well, and thankfully most of the games are made this way. 
This is the proper one, I fully agree.

> That said, I won't mind listening if you have an argument for static-linking.

The only reason I reported it is that I wanted to fully replace SI 
implementation with soft in my system and alext.h and static versions 
were the things I was missing. Static lib is not crucial for me and even 
if it will be I can easily make one myself. Just thought that building 
one with upstream wont hurt.

> No plans to stop it yet. :) Although isn't Apple's OpenAL still open source 
> (in the SVN repo)? Or is that an old version like the Windows one?

Good to hear that. I'm not sure about OSX thought, haven't checked that 
but what was I was going to say was that both of these companies took it 
from Linux and 'forked' it leaving Linux one in poor shape.

I'll be providing more user-kind feedback soon. For now I tested BTRL, 
AvP and UT2004. I'll test Penumbra, X2, X3 (as soon as new beta comes 
out) and probably some older Loki/LGP games I might have somewhere.


-- 
Regards    Havner                     {jid,mail}:havner(at)pld-linux.org
                    "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
-------------- next part --------------
pcm.!default
{
	type route
	slave {
		pcm {
			type softvol
			slave {
				pcm surround51
			}

			control {
				name "Main"
			}

			min_dB -25.0
			max_dB 0.0
			resolution 51
		}
		channels 6
	}

# Front and rear
	ttable.0.0 0.5
	ttable.1.1 0.5
	ttable.2.2 0.5
	ttable.3.3 0.5
# Center channel routing (routed to front-left and front-right),
	ttable.4.0 0.25
	ttable.4.1 0.25
# Ignore subwoofer
	#ttable.5.0 0
	#ttable.5.1 0

# Front/rear to headphones
	ttable.0.4 0.4
	ttable.1.5 0.4
	ttable.2.4 0.4
	ttable.3.5 0.4
# Center to headphones
	ttable.4.4 0.2
	ttable.4.5 0.2
# Ignore subwoofer
	#ttable.5.4 0
	#ttable.5.5 0
}