[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.

[Sammi79]

Hi again, after a days searching I have managed to solve the OpenAl error by placing the file 'soft_oal.dll' in the Amnesia/Redist/ folder. To get this file follow the second link in the first post and instructions in the sticky thread at the top of the technical support page titled 'On surround sound and hardware devices' by Luis.

Regards, Sam.

Edit : link to thread - http://www.frictionalgames.com/forum/thread-4313.html
: link from thread - http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html#download.