On surround sound and hardware devices

[Voodooman]

For those wanting to get the game to use surround sound, here are some tips.

First, for your information, the game is made to filter whatever hardware devices it finds on your system, thus making them not appear in the game options and launcher device selectors. This was made this way due to several incompatibilities and glitches detected when testing them. You can always force the game to use an unsupported device by manually editing the settings file and setting the sound device to the desired ID (reference on available devices should appear in a game output log). Note that we cannot provide much help with any problems arising from trying these.

Second, for those wondering where their Generic Hardware devices are, OpenAL Generic Hardware devices will not work on Windows versions from Vista or newer, due to Microsoft dropping support for DirectSound3D. More details in the following link:
http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/O...84%A2.aspx

Now here is some trick that should work for everyone. There is a software implementation of OpenAL called OpenAL-soft that supports surround sound setups on pretty much any capable sound card. You can get it here: http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html#download. Just download the Win32 binary package and look for a 'soft_oal.dll' (should be located in the openal-soft--bin/Win32 directory in the package). This 'soft_oal.dll' file should be copied to the game redist folder, i.e. where the game exe is located. After having done so, in the launcher and game options there should be a new selectable sound device. Make sure to configure your speakers properly in control panel, and select this device in the game options. And voilà.

Guys, you got it a little bit wrong, DS3D HAL was removed in Vista and 7 and this only affects games that uses DirectSound3D (dsound.dll) with EAX, games that natively uses OpenAL with EFX (OpenAL32.dll) are not affected and useses hardware acceleration (if proper soundcard available), or fallback to software SURROUND SOUND rendering (if hardware accelleration not available for device)!!!

And even DS3D games works perfectly fine (with few rare exceptions) with help of Creative Alchemy, which is simply Dsound.dll > OpenAL32.dll wrapper and have full surround sound and EAX on Vista and 7!!!

So this filtering of devices for software only was kinda dulll decision!

From creative site:

OpenAL on Windows Vista

As already stated above, Microsoft® will be removing DirectSound 3D Hardware support from Direct X with the launch of Windows Vista. DirectSound and DirectSound3D will still function; however, they will no longer use hardware acceleration.

The native OpenAL devices on Sound Blaster Audigy and Sound Blaster X-Fi™ soundcards do not use DirectSound or DirectSound 3D and so they will be completely unaffected. For games that use these devices, nothing will change. The game will continue to enjoy hardware based 3D audio and effects.

The Generic Hardware device will no longer be available, as it requires the use of hardware DirectSound 3D Buffers. Instead, this device will gracefully, and automatically, fallback to using the Generic Software device, which will continue to work as before.