[SOLVED] OpenAL error (intermittent) + questions

[Sammi79]

Hi, first of all my system specs :-

Acer Aspire 8943g Laptop
Intel i7-720QM @1.66GHz
ATI Mobility Radeon 5850HD 1Gb dedicated upto 4Gb shared vram
AMD High Definition Audio Device
8Gb DDR3 Ram
Win7x64 Premium

I recently bought and played through Amnesia : The Dark Descent without a single problem. My first experience with Frictional Games software and a thoroughly positive one. Brilliant engine and a fantastic horror story, complimented beautifully by the freely available toolkit - I wait with baited breath and great anticipation for the next title, but enough of the well deserved praise.

My problem started after i installed the HPL2 tools and started learning how to use the level editor. Thus far I have had no need to post questions in this regard due to the excellent tutorials on the wiki and the development support section of this forum, I am currently creating a custom story based on one of my personal favorite series of books by Ursula K. Le Guin.

following the tutorials I created a map and setup the relevant .cfg files to test it, and upon execution of the launcher immediately encountered the 'FATAL ERROR : No sound devices available, please check your OpenAL installation' Me being me I OK'd the error and clicked the start bar pinned launcher icon again. This time it worked, so I thought nothing of it. However after every execution of any of the HPL2 tools, the error reappears and normally promptly disappears when I again click the launcher icon. Sometimes it does not go away though, and the only resolution then is to restart the computer, or sometimes disabling/re-enabling the sound device from control panel works, sometimes not, I have searched the forum and tried everything suggested for people with similar problems to no avail.

It is not a major issue as I can work around the error as described above just a little annoying especially when a restart is required for testing maps/scripts/etc. I have reinstalled OpenAL several times, trying downloads from different sites, currently using ALCapsViewer (64bit) my version number for OpenAL32.dll is 6.14.357.24 and wrap_oal.dll is 2.2.0.7 Is this the latest version? Any thoughts appreciated.

My other questions are in regard to the editors :-

1. Is it possible to make them full screen without manually altering the screen dimensions and positioning the window?

2. Is there a way to get them to save my preferred back-ground colour? currently upon every reload or file load the colour is reset to the default grey.

Regards, Sam.