Game dev have no clue on suroundsound?

http://www.viperlair.com/articles/retired/xmaswish.shtml
If you want to have a debate on why a standard isn't used anymore fish99, it might be a good idea to check if the company representing it didn't die several years ago
And, just for the fun... RIP, Rampage

Uttar

 

The Surround Sound problems in Doom 3 are Doom 3 problems... Doom 3 checks to see if your windows speakers are set to 5.1 speaker mode and will only output in surround if it is set to that.

If Doom3 had used DirectSound3D to do the sound mixing, then this wouldn't be a problem.

 

Well, that makes the anti-EAX posts look even more stupid. When I said 'tell me a better acoustics modelling system' I obviously meant one that was still being used I mean I do believe you guys that A3D was great, but if it's gone it's gone...

If it's EAX or nothing I'll choose EAX.

 

"Better" is highly contended. It only gives surround sound on 5.1 systems and it doesn't support sound environments (aka reverb etc), occlusions, reflections or any of that stuff. It just does 5.1 surround, and it happens to do that pretty well. It's simple, but effective. Not exactly what I'd call BETTER though.

We don't know what's going on in that respect. We do know there's no EAX support in the boxed version of the game though. Me personally would rather see EAX support in the game rather than the pretty simple sound it offers now, preferably EAX HD as I have an audigy2 zs, so I don't really complain if Creative forces it down id's throat.

This is the big dilemma. Creative does make the best soundcard at the moment for gamers, nothing out there beats the A2 ZS, but EAX beyond version 2 isn't an open standard so few games uses it. PC audio has really stagnated these past few years, pretty much all that's happened is instead of 4 speakers we've grown to 7.1, but support for that is sporadic due to Microsoft's incompetence (and developer incompetence too I might add). MS needs to add realtime hardware sound decompression support in the directsound API, Doom3 has over 100MB of audio per level uncompressed, and other games may be close to that figure. They also need to convince Creative to open the higher EAX versions to other sound hardware manufacturers and push devs to actually use it.

You're such a funny guy, Ignorance... As opposed to me, you of course hate all PC products equally. You're silly and rediculous. Go buy a clue, alright?

EAX 1 isn't so good. EAX2 is an improvement EAX 3 and up should be pretty decent, but I don't actually have any games that uses those features. Maybe Far Cry, I'm not sure, I didn't think it had particulary effective use of sound. It was positional alright, but no occlusion effects or such.

 

I think a small clarification of terminology is in order.

Directsound3D is the API that handles positional sound in Windows. There's no need to talk about EAX here, that's beside the point. EAX is an extension to the DS3D API providing a way to describe environmental effects (reverb, occlusion, obstruction). Whether different implementations of EAX sound good or not isn't relevant here. The algorithms doing the actual positioning are.

And herein lies the problem. Whereas both Creative and Sensaura (Sensaura algorithms are used in almost all non-Creative sound cards. Qsound provides a 3D sound engine too but I don't think it's widely used nowadays.) have very good positioning algorithms for both headphones and different speaker configurations, Doom 3 has very rudimentary system that doesn't do nearly as convincing a job.

Quite a bit of research has gone into creating the head-related transfer funtions and crosstalk cancellation algorithms that convincing positional audio engines need and that is why I don't advocate the use of second-rate sound mixing tech hard-coded into the game engine.

 

How is the sound system in Doom 3 better, exactly? And if you can't get over your teenage "Creative sucks" mindset, how is the sound positioning in Doom 3 better than using, say, Sensaura algorithms via Directsound3D?

 

Boll,

I don't know which Doom 3 you played, but the one I played pans sounds very smoothly and convincingly between my 5.1 speakers. End of story.

You don't actually need HRT stuff and such if you got multiple speakers. HRT is used to simulate virtual speakers (and it doesn't really work all that well in reality as the function has no control over how the user's speakers are placed in relation to the speaker, their frequency response or how the user's ears are shaped.

The one instance where Doom 3's surround engine is superior to the regular DS3D interface is likely CPU useage (and knowing Carmack, probably portability across platforms). He stated D3's sound engine used less CPU running entirely in software than even the best of hardware accelerated engines do. Of course, we miss out on environmental effects this way, as that gets a bit more expensive to do in software...

 

Guden, Doom 3 does support sound occlusion.

 

Khm... it rather makes your comment even more stupid - you didn't even hear about Aureal yet...

Why?

You obviously don't make a distinction between EAX and EAX4, so nothing is logical.
Moreover !NEWSFLASH! if something was killed by the competitor, bought and immediately stopped, that doesn't mean the winner is better.

Ahem... don't believe me - go and check.

Hmmm... there's other stuff out there...

 

What is up with you? You've offered no arguments to any of my points, you've just been making stupid cheap shots from your first post in this thread. Is this how you behave in real life? Of course I've heard of Aureal, but what's it's relevance if it's dead? I said I believed you that it was good, I wasn't being sarcastic - but why the hell should I go buy an A3D supporting soundcard now, it's not gonna do anything in games I'll playing now.

Also I never mentioned EAX4, the games I mentioned that had EAX support were mostly EAX1.

 

You had no points, my forumfella.

BS. If you'd heard about it, you wouldn't say EAX is super ever.

? Neither I - I just pointed out don't believe only for me but rather read about it, it's very interesting subject.

You are too sensitive, mate, aren't you?

I never said that.

Yes and that was REALLY sux. Especially compared to Aureal at the time.

 

No it doesn't! Or if it does, it certainly doesn't use it. Sounds seem entirely distance attenuated with no attention paid to wether objects stand inbetween the source and the listener.

Just to check again for myself just now - because I sure as fuck never noticed any occlusion going on - I loaded up my most recent quicksave, which was in the beginning of the comms facility level where the player is supposed to call for reinforcements. Clear the garage at the start and up the elevator. A secret hatch will open, there's a soldier on the other side. Kill him and the zombie in the secret alcove that opens and the teleporting dude that spawns near the door onwards. Open the door to the room where the soldier was using the red panel near the elevator. Go inside.

Right at the door there's a broken ceiling light that sends out sparks. Even with a wall inbetween you and the light it doesn't sound any different than when standing right under it. No muffling at all.

So there's no occlusion in the game.

And T2k, what you grinning for?

 

Isn't there an occlusion cvar for sound in the game?

 

Hehe, I found it funny you'll argue against D3's sound, because you were its biggest fan, despite its mediocre quality.

 

If A3D had been widely supported back in the days when EAX and A3D were competing, I would have considered buying an Aureal card. I remember reading a review of EAX and A3D back in the days when Half-Life had just come out - I remember they said A3D had much better 3D sound but EAX had better acoustic environment modelling (if that's wrong tell them not me).

So largely based on that I bought an SBLive, also because the best games around (in my opinion) at that time only supported EAX, with the exception of Half-Life, which supported both.

Like I said though it's irrelevant now if Aureal have gone bust. Buying a soundcard now for present and future games - aureal isn't an option. It's rather like having a discussion about how great Glide is.

 

I've had a Diamond MX300 back then and I never had any problems - and it was far superior to Live.

 

I never said you did. A3D is the 3D sound system. If games don't support A3D that doesn't mean they don't work at all, just that they don't support A3D.

As I said it doesn't matter how good A3D was if it wasn't supported in games I wanted to play. And if it's not gonna be in any more games from now on, it's not even worth talking about.