[Openal] openal future

[Yvan Vander Sanden]

My apologies for asking this, since it seems a bit rude to question
all the good work done, especially by people in their free time.

But the thing is, i'm working on a quite large art project at the
moment in which 3d sound is very important. I made the first tests at
the beginning of the year with the openal library and had good
results. And I really liked the part where I could even take wall
reflections into account, although I have not tried it out yet. (In
fact, I cannot find that documentation anymore. It seems it's not on
the current site??)

But now I'm working on the real project and it's time to choose an
audio engine. And I'll will be working on this project for several
years, I guess. I choose linux as a platform because it's more likely
to keep stable (and i did not want the operating system the only thing
not open source in the project). OpenGL development is making good
progress, thanks to irrlicht.

But what about openAL? I've seen some bad signs lately. Wasn't there
an openal.org site? It's gone and redirected to
http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal, but everything on that site is
more than a year old too. Last changes date from 5/30/2008.

Ok, there's openAL soft. Didn't trust that one at first, since the
information is quite minimalistic. But by looking at the repository I
found out Chris Robinson is quite active in developing it. My respect
for that if you're reading this, Chris. But then again, the project
relies on one man only, which is always a risk.

And although Daniel is always very active in helping everyone here, I
have my doubts about help from Creative in the long run. The X-FI
drivers for Linux have not been a set good example either.

Of course OpenAL as such is an open standard, but programming can't do
with standards alone, it needs a library, good documentation and not
in the least progress.

Perhaps more experienced programmers could assure me that it's not
that bad as I think it looks. But I'm very eager to hear some opinions
on this, before I start getting a lot of openAL code into my project.

Thanks for reading,

yvan