Re: [Plib-devel] OpenAL/plib

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

Alexander Rawass wrote:

> > 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.

I know it - but it's a matter of time - I don't have enough time to write
all this cool new stuff.

> 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.

Yep.  SL already has the code to prioritize sounds (not necessarily the
loudest - the application gets to set the priorities.
 
> 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).

That's what OpenAL does.

> 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.

OpenAL does all that too.  If we added 'sound nodes' into the SSG API, you
wouldn't need to do *anything* in your game - you'd get range-dependent
volume, 3D spatialisation *and* doppler shift without writing a single line
of code.

> 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.

Yep...although I can't claim credit for the idea - it's been done
many times before.


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