[Openal] Re: Openal Digest, vol 5, Issue 6 - David Guthrie thread, OpenAL unworkable

[William Stewart]

On 12/08/2006, at 3:26 PM, Roger Eastman wrote:

> I have to agree with you.  I used to use alut only for the  
> functions alutLoadWAVFile and alutUnloadWAV.  That's it.  All I  
> wanted to do was to load the WAV files.  Now I don't even know how  
> to go about doing that anymore.
>
> My temporary solution is to use the header file from freealut and  
> forget about trying to compile a library, especially with the  
> duplicate symbol problem.  I get warnings about alutLoadWAVFile  
> being deprecated, but at least my program works.

That's probably the best way - if you are using alut functions, then  
you should start to move over to the correct source of those (and the  
OpenAL binary distribution is not that source). Ideally,  freealut  
would not be defining symbols that conflict with the OAL 1.0 symbols  
of alut - that's essentially the source of the problem - and we can't  
remove those symbols from our distribution or none of your games will  
run!

> What does it mean for it to be deprecated, anyway?

Don't use it - in the short term it means the exported symbol is  
still available, so there shouldn't be any runtime problems.  
Generally, bugs won't be addressed in an API once its deprecated -  
what you have is what you get... What happens after that is kind of  
at the whim of the API provider - at some point the call may not be  
supported/exported (or not). For example, with the 64 bit support  
Apple just announced, many deprecated APIs are not available to 64bit  
applications.

> Does that mean that when Mac OS X 10.4.8 comes out, my game will  
> stop working?

No - the exported symbols are not removed - its really just an advice  
to the developer to stop using the API and to use alternatives. This  
can take some time (for example, new API is only available on new OS  
releases, etc, so time has to be provided for migration, etc).

Bill

> Does anybody remember SndPlay, and how incredibly simple it was to  
> use!!  Some of us programmers just want to play a simple  
> asynchronous sound (NSSound doesn't do that).
>
> Sorry to flame.  I honestly do appreciate all the work that is  
> going into OpenAL.  Thanks everyone, really.
>
>> So basically what you're saying is that there is just no way to use
>> alut on OS X without hacking in the old header like I did.  Not
>> meaning to be rude or anything, but that's really just not
>> acceptable.  Now apps that USED to compile, don't, and I can't link
>> freealut to fix it.  We're all basically stuck.  This is leaning more
>> toward non-functional/unworkable than inconvenient.
>
> -Roger Eastman
> http://www.rigelprime.com
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
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tel: +1 408 974 4056
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