Sound Hardware Compatibility

[ 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. ]

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.

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.

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?

Jim Bower



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