[Openal] openal future

[Jason Daly]

Yvan Vander Sanden wrote:
> 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.
>   

The server that hosted the old web site was on its last legs, and the 
new site was merged into Creative's overall web site as a matter of 
convenience (the Creative open source pages are on the same site, for 
example).

No offense to Dan, as I'm sure that the new site was forced on him by 
the higher-ups, but I've never been happy with the new web site either.  
However, it does get the job done.  There hasn't been many changes on 
the site, because there haven't been any revisions to specs or 
documentations.  If you look, though the download links do have the 
newest implementations available, including OpenAL-Soft 1.7, which was 
just released last month, I believe.


> 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.
>   

There's no reason not to trust OpenAL-Soft.  It's quite simply the best 
software implementation available.  It started with Creative's original 
software implementation for Windows, to which Chris has added quite a 
number of enhancements.

As to the risk, even if Chris stops working on it, the code is 
open-source, so if you ever run into any problems with it, you're free 
to dive in and fix it.


> 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.
>   

Have you tried the latest X-Fi drivers for Linux (the 1.0 release)?  I 
have no idea why they were shipped so silently, but they seem to have 
addressed just about every problem I ever had with them.  I downloaded 
them, followed the instructions, and they just worked (even on Fedora 10 
64-bit), no quirky installation, no clunky recompiling, no problems 
loading the modules.  I was quite surprised, and very pleased.

Don't go to the old Beta site, go to the regular Creative Labs driver 
download site.  The latest driver was released November of 2008.

Also, keep in mind that Creative did release many of the hardware 
details of the X-Fi to the OSS and ALSA projects, so there will be 
drivers at some point.


> 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.
>   

What documentation are you missing?  The core spec is pretty complete.  
A lot of the extensions could be documented better, but the big ones 
(EFX, and MCFORMATS) are pretty well complete, I think.

OpenAL-Soft continues to make progress.  I'm not sure where Creative is 
on its road map these days, though.  The OSX implementation is updated 
with each OS revision, I think.

> 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.
>   

I think OpenAL is getting used by a fair number of projects.  Some 
players in the game industry still use it (at least as one option).  
It's true that there hasn't been any progress in the spec for a while, 
although several extensions have been proposed and some have been 
implemented recently (Chris can talk about this better than me).

I wouldn't give up on OpenAL yet.  Just out of curiosity, what other 
solutions have you considered, and why?

--"J"