[Openal] Do any implementations support alcSuspendContextcorrectly?

[Daniel PEACOCK]

Hi Eric,

>As I understand "batching", this will let you queue up OpenAL commands
>while the context is suspended. Then when you resume processing, all
>the commands (potentially coalesced?) are sent to the card. Is this
>correct?

Yes that's right.  It can give a pretty good speed-up, particularly for
games that update a lot of parameters regularly.  However, as I also said,
it gets pretty complicated to keep track of everything that happens unless
you resort to simply storing a list of commands and values - which wouldn't
be so optimal.

The specification is very vague about the exact behaviour - and therefore
would be a good thing to sort out for a future version of OpenAL.

Dan
Creative Labs (UK) Ltd.

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                                                                   Subject 
                                       Re: [Openal] Do any implementations 
             07/29/2009 01:59          support                             
             AM                        alcSuspendContextcorrectly?         
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           




Thanks for the responses on this. I had to sit and think about it for
awhile. One thing that struck me was that alcSuspendContext with
Creative cards allows for batching commands.

As I understand "batching", this will let you queue up OpenAL commands
while the context is suspended. Then when you resume processing, all
the commands (potentially coalesced?) are sent to the card. Is this
correct?

I had not thought of this in terms of alcSuspendContext. For some
reason or another, I was thinking that  a suspended context would just
throw away commands (become no-ops). But after thinking about this and
dealing with an evil corner case on the iPhone with handling phone
call interruptions, I think I like the idea of queuing up commands to
be run when processing resumes.

However, re-reading the spec, I don't think any of this behavior is
actually specified. Again, talking about 1.2 wishlists, I think this
needs to be drawn up.

Thanks,
Eric
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