[Openal] OpenAL Soft's alcOpenDevice returns null

[Chris Robinson]

On Monday 10 March 2008 11:45:45 am Stephen A. wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am developing an application on Windows XP, running in VMWare. Things
> work as long as I am using the OpenAL installer found here:
> http://developer.creative.com/articles/article.asp?cat=1&sbcat=31&top=38&ai
>d=46.
>
> OpenAL Soft 1.3.253 however, does not work. Enumerating devices only
> returns a "Wave File Writer" device, but the actual call to alcOpenDevice
> fails regardless of parameters.

The wave file writer can only be opened when an output file is specified in 
the configuration file. However, the Windows code doesn't have any place to 
look for an OpenAL Soft configuration file (thus it'll always fail).

Does the VMWare system have DirectSound capabilities? If so, make sure OpenAL 
Soft is building with DSound support (check the output during cmake). If it 
doesn't, then it's possible that Creative's drivers can use the old WaveOut 
API, while OpenAL Soft doesn't.

> The same call also fails on Ubuntu 7.10 
> (only tested with the default implementation, not OpenAL Soft), which
> leads me to believe I may be doing something wrong.

The device names returned by enumeration are implementation specific. 
Passing "Wave File Writer" to implementations other than OpenAL Soft is 
likely not to work. NULL is the only legal value that's gauranteed across 
platforms (to select a default). Also, the default implementation isn't very 
good with enumeration (especially version 0.0.8).