Re: Sound Hardware Compatibility

Hi, Jim,


Jim B. wrote:
> [ We have OpenAL in beta test for the open source game, Alien Arena
> (homepage: http://icculus.org/alienarena/rpa/
> svn browse: http://svn.icculus.org/alienarena/ ).
> It uses the crx engine, derived from the Quake 2 engine and runs
> in Windows and Unix/Linux. So far, the testing is going well.
> I have several questions, posted today under 3 separate
> subjects. ]
>  

Sounds like a cool project!


> Alien Arena currently is runnable on a wide-range hardware by allowing the
> user to turn off higher performance features.  In our beta test we have
> already discovered that it is best to disable Doppler by default, since some
> older hardware did not handle Doppler that well.
>  

Probably not a bad idea, although I think the Doppler issues of the past
are fading quickly.


> Currently, we support 2 different Unix/Linux builds; one using OSS sound and
> the other using SDL sound.  So, one question is: is it worthwhile to keep the
> SDL version?  Is it likely that there would be systems that could not run
> OpenAL-Soft 1.7.411 that would be able to run with SDL sound.
>  

I'll let Chris answer this one, as I'm not sure what the current state is.


> We are planning on releasing the Windows version with OpenAL only.
>
> So the general question is: What do we need to be watching out for? In looking
> around the Web, it looks like there is a lot of "noise" about sound hardware
> and software problems. But, is this just a matter of getting drivers installed
> correctly or are there real problems?  I am trying to decide if we need to
> have non-OpenAL versions available to fallback to?
>  

I've installed a couple of different OpenAL apps on Windows, and I
haven't had any issues with them for a while now.  The only think I'd
advise is that you should make running oalinst.exe automatic, if
possible.  I don't know what you're using to create your installer
package, but it's typically fairly easy to run oalinst as part of the
install process.  This avoids 90% of the problems you might run into.

On Linux, you have to count on the users a bit more, but usually this
isn't a big problem.

I can't think of any reason you'd need a non-OpenAL fallback, as even
the simplest graphics hardware should support the waveOut system, which
is one of the back-ends that the Windows implementation can use.

--"J"

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