Finally started playing

[satsun]

How exactly does FMOD fake 3D sound? It's just audio that is panned from channel to channel based on player location, the pan size and signal ratio is all controllable. OpenAL is a dinosaur, and hardware sound acceleration is no longer needed these days (in terms of effecting quality, most soundcards use the hardware for encoding different streams for different devices (Dolby, DTS etc) it really doesn't do anything. TDD and Pigs both use the Ogg Vorbis as delivery for audio, OpenAL just has a standard playback system for Ogg Vorbis that allows us to start, stop, fade and loop. Whereas with FMOD we are able to set parameters which dynamically effect the audio, so, through some special scripting we can create some really complex cool logic for audio playback. OpenAL's 3D panning (imho) is pretty poor, I perceive it as the signal either being 100% L or 100% R (for stereo setups), it never sits nicely between the two. We have done a lot of mono/stereo blending in Pigs to combat this, as it was having a detrimental effect on the quality of the sound.

Heh, OpenAL doesn't seem that bad but 1) I'm not in game development so I've never had to work with it and 2) I at least agree that it should go away.

The only OpenAL-based game I've been impressed with is Killing Floor yet it also BSODs if you play it on a 64bit OS with an X-Fi card. In KF, with OAL and EAX, the game has some quite good-sounding environmental effects but I'm not sure if that's just EAX doing all of the work. The reverb effect isn't overbearing and sounds in the distance actually sound like they're in the distance and not just quieter so I guess certain frequencies are cut to get that effect. Guns firing in the distance also sometimes sound muffled depending on where they are and character voices are appropriately muffled behind walls.

As far as Amnesia goes, kinda sucks to hear that AMP is still using OpenAL. I just think that TDD sounds very dry and if AMP continues with OpenAL that it'll be similar. The music and sound effects in TDD were nice but the environment sounded completely dry with no additional effects. You're in a structure that consists of 98% stone and there's not an ounce of reverb in this place. Considering TDD probably wasn't a big budget game I guess I can't hold it against them.

[samueljustice00]

Well that's a design choice really, in AMFP the environments sound very real and a lot of emphasis has been placed on replicating real space through reverb and mono/stereo blending. But all of that is baked into the sound and wired together through script. It's wholly possible without processing done on the fly, but could well of been a design choice for TDD to have the way you described.