[Plib-devel] OpenAL/plib

[Alexander R. <a_r...@in...>]

Hi,

Steve Baker wrote:
> 
> I wrote SL on a 66MHz 486 - three sounds mixed, with dynamic pitch AND
> volume envelopes seemed like a reasonable limit back then.
> 
> On a modern machine, we could easily wipe out the 3 sound limit - and
> increase it to (say) 32 simultaneous sounds.

You should do that - there are many people owning a very faster computer
now.
But you should also care, that the end-user can run it on his old 486 as
well - maybe by telling plibsl something like export PLIBSL_MAX_VOICES=3
to hear only the 3 loudest sounds.

> You *could* also hook into direct sound - or other sound API's - but there
> doesn't seem much point in doing that unless you want some of the REALLY
> fancy features like 3D sound.  If you are interested in that stuff then
> I recommend that you look at OpenAL instead of SL.
> 
> I'm somewhat tempted to abandon the current SL - re-implementing it as
> a thin layer on top of OpenAL just to allow continued support of existing
> applications. Then we could do cool things like embedding OpenAL sound
> sources as nodes in the SSG scene graph. Then you'd get automatically
> positioned 3D sound...but I just don't have the time these days.

You mentioned OpenAL before, I didn't have time to look at it, but some
day
I've got to go to get a better Soundsystem for my game (I really need
full
2D/3D here).

In my game, every object is (will be) one or more sound sources, the
sound-
handler knows about the positions of sound source and hearer in space
and can
therefore be calctulated, how loud the sound is and the balance between
left/right (in 2D) or even more loudspeakers.

I intended to call an update routine like
	update_sound(soundobject,soundobject_position,hearer_position)
every frame, that sets balance and volume new, but including that in a
ssg
node would 'come more natural'. That would be really clever.

Well - if not someone gives me a better soundsystem I can use, I have
do it for myself, getting OpenAL and using that in my game - but after
that, I probably know enough about OpenAL to put it into plib - if
someone helps me, if not someone other does it before.

But it will probably take some months until I want to do on the
Sound-System.


Alex

-- 
                   Alexander Rawass
          Email: ale...@us...
   Project Homepage: http://kobayashimaru.sourceforge.net
...but some day you'll be a STAR in somebody else's SKY...