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OpenAL issue

ungoliant

By ungoliant
in TDM Tech Support

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ungoliant

ungoliant

Posted
Posted (edited)

Trouble with new PC, I suspect this issue originated during my migration from WindowsXPx32 to Windows7x64.

 

Heres the console output:

***************

ERROR: idSoundCache: error loading data into OpenAL hardware buffer

***************

WARNING: idSession: triggering mainmenu watchdog

 

I'm still new to this confounded Windows7 64 bit thingamajigger, but the one fix I've tried so far is adding .../doom3/darkmod path in Creative ALchemy, but yields no results...

 

(Also, I'm currently using on-board sound on new motherboard instead of Audigy 2 ZS, might also be part of the problem...?)

 

edit: game works with EAX disabled, this is starting to look like another thread I've seen.

Edited by ungoliant
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ungoliant

ungoliant

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It looks like OpenAL and or Alchamey arent installed correctly.

 

Here's the weird thing: Vanilla Doom3 is working properly with OpenAL. Darkmod is not. I've tried manually adding darkmod individually to openal, and also adding darkmod folder as a subfolder of doom3 for its openAL entry. neither provides joy.

 

If it was just EAX I wouldn't care so much, but for whatever reason, 7.1 surround will not work without EAX enabled in TDM.

Edited by ungoliant
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Bikerdude

Bikerdude

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Posted

well I hope you have better luck than I have, I pulled the Xfi to have a listen to the on-board audio and it looks like my board has fallen faul to the same issue lots of other owners have in that the onboard card itself is fubared but I never thought to check before now being that I have always used the Xfi.

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ungoliant

ungoliant

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interesting discovery... the surround sound setting influences a cvar called s_numberOfSpeakers. acceptable values are 2, and 6. 2 channels is obviously stereo, 6 is 5.1 surround. There is no option for 8 speaker.

 

So i did a little experiment. I switched my speaker settings in control pannel to run as 5.1, restarted doom3, now all of a sudden, 5.1 surround sound works fine. very clearly, obviously works, for all missions, without EAX support enabled.

 

concluding statement: I don't want to have to change my speaker settings every time to play TDM and lose my side channel speakers in the process!! (and eax still doesn't work). at least i figured out the surround sound issue. Has anybody ever had luck using a full 7.1 surround system??

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ungoliant

ungoliant

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hrrrrmmm... this openAL thing is getting weirder. With EAX enabled, I get this in console on loadup:

----- Initializing Sound System ------
Setup OpenAL device and context... Done.
OpenAL: found EAX 4.0 extension
OpenAL: no EAX-RAM extension
OpenAL: found Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)
OpenAL: found 126 hardware voices
sound system initialized
------------------------------------------------------

However, loading up any FM still yields:

*****************
ERROR: idSoundCache: error loading data into OpenAL hardware buffer
*****************

 

so EAX and OpenAL works.... but theres some sort of buffer error...?

Edited by ungoliant
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Tels

Tels

Posted
Posted

interesting discovery... the surround sound setting influences a cvar called s_numberOfSpeakers. acceptable values are 2, and 6. 2 channels is obviously stereo, 6 is 5.1 surround. There is no option for 8 speaker.

 

So i did a little experiment. I switched my speaker settings in control pannel to run as 5.1, restarted doom3, now all of a sudden, 5.1 surround sound works fine. very clearly, obviously works, for all missions, without EAX support enabled.

 

concluding statement: I don't want to have to change my speaker settings every time to play TDM and lose my side channel speakers in the process!! (and eax still doesn't work). at least i figured out the surround sound issue. Has anybody ever had luck using a full 7.1 surround system??

 

Does that qualify as some sort of bug in TDM? What is the expected issue here, could you please describe it? Then we should open a bug tracker entry for it.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Tels

Tels

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Posted

hrrrrmmm... this openAL thing is getting weirder. With EAX enabled, I get this in console on loadup:

----- Initializing Sound System ------
Setup OpenAL device and context... Done.
OpenAL: found EAX 4.0 extension
OpenAL: no EAX-RAM extension
OpenAL: found Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)
OpenAL: found 126 hardware voices
sound system initialized
------------------------------------------------------

However, loading up any FM still yields:

*****************
ERROR: idSoundCache: error loading data into OpenAL hardware buffer
*****************

 

so EAX and OpenAL works.... but theres some sort of buffer error...?

 

The error message appears in three places i the code and all of them use this before:

 

    alBufferData( openalBuffer, objectInfo.nChannels==1?AL_FORMAT_MONO16:AL_FORMAT_STEREO16, destData, objectSize * sizeof( short ), objectInfo.nSamplesPerSec );

 

My hunch is that because objectInfo.nChannels = 6 (instead of 1 or 2?) AL_FORMAT_STEREO16 is used, by maybe this doesn't really work? The first step would be to make the error message include the place it is emitted from, and the actual error code that is produced. Then maybe we get a better idea what goes wrong.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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ungoliant

ungoliant

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I have no idea how to find that out unless you send me some sort of special compile with modified error messages from all 3 sources.

 

Also, just fyi, the Creative Alchemy fix is totally useless. since doom 1.3 openAL has been supported, and the initialization console output in my above post seems to agree with me on that since it shows up with or without alchemy installed in doom3/darkmod folders.

 

see: here

Edited by ungoliant
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Tels

Tels

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I can change the code, but I can't compile for windows (and this would be a v1.08 compile, anyway). But I guess changing the error message to be better would still be a good idea.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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ungoliant

ungoliant

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console output from vanilla doom3:

----------------------
---- idSoundCache::EndLevelLoad -----
26738k referenced
6971k purged
-----------------------
sound: found efxs/mc_underground.efx
----------------------

also, "s_numberofspeakers" takes 8 as an acceptable value in vanilla, and I can confirm all 8 channels are working in vanilla doom3, with EAX enabled and functional.

 

I will do some checking between the doomconfig.cfg's in doom3/base and /darkmod folders to see if there are any discrepencies in the "s_" cvars, but i'm starting to suspect this is a TDM problem.

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Tels

Tels

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Posted

Error messages changed, at least :)

 

Please file a bug tracker entry and link it to this thread. Thanx!

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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ungoliant

ungoliant

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will do after this post

 

one last thing -

 

the only difference between s_ cvars in default doom3 and tdm doomconfig.cfg's is: (respectively)

seta s_doorDistanceAdd "150"

vs

seta s_doorDistanceAdd "450"

 

i suspect this changes nothing useful.

 

What is the expected issue here, could you please describe it?

 

To summarize -

1) TDM accepts only s_numberofspeakers values of 2, and 6. vanilla doom3 accepts at least 2, 6, 8, possibly more.

2) In certain hardware setups (apparently, at a guess), EAX will not function in TDM, and EAX is required to change from 2 to 6 speakers.

3) ALchemy is not a fix for any Doom3 sound issues, its bogus.

 

For some configurations: EAX will not work. No EAX = no surround sound.

For all configurations: TDM only accepts 2 or 5.1 channel sound.

 

edit: #3220, #3221

Edited by ungoliant
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Tels

Tels

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Yeah, our code does this:

 

    if ( idSoundSystemLocal::s_numberOfSpeakers.GetInteger() != 6 && idSoundSystemLocal::s_numberOfSpeakers.GetInteger() != 2 ) {
		    common->Warning( "invalid value for s_numberOfSpeakers. Use either 2 or 6" );
		    idSoundSystemLocal::s_numberOfSpeakers.SetInteger( 2 );
    }

 

Probably easy to change, but I have neither EAX (doesn't work on linux), nor more than 2 speakers, nor a sound card for this (I guess?), nor windows. Sorry :)

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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ungoliant

ungoliant

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Probably easy to change, but I have neither EAX (doesn't work on linux), nor more than 2 speakers, nor a sound card for this (I guess?), nor windows. Sorry :)

 

ARGH!! well.... plz just delete those lines for 1.08???? the "surround sound" menu option only toggles between 2 and 6 anyways!! the only way an end user could possibly mess up their speaker config would be to manually edit the s_numberofspeakers cvar! 6.1 and 7.1 surround users should have the ability to configure 7 or 8 speakers!

 

edit: damnit! setting doomconfig.cfg to read only does not block your malicious code, lol

Edited by ungoliant
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Tels

Tels

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It's easily removed, but wouldn't it be better to let the user make the choice in the menu, too?

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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  • 5 weeks later...
SeriousToni

SeriousToni

Posted
Posted (edited)

Does someone have a working download link for openal? I can't download it from the original site since it needs an authentification. And google only directs me to fake downloads from softonic :(

 

EDIT: Ah okay got it now hehe:

http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Downloads/oalinst.zip

Edited by SeriousToni

"Einen giftigen Trank aus Kräutern und Wurzeln für die närrischen Städter wollen wir brauen." - Text aus einem verlassenen Heidenlager

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lowenz

lowenz

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Try this software OpenAL FREE (and open) implementation: http://kcat.stranges...net/openal.html

 

OpenAL Soft's code has been improved to support mono, stereo, 4-channel, 5.1, 6.1, and 7.1 output. OpenAL Soft does not support the Vorbis and MP3 extensions, however these are considered deprecated. It does, though, support some of the newer extensions like AL_EXT_FLOAT32 and AL_EXT_MCFORMATS for multi-channel and floating-point formats, as well as ALC_EXT_EFX for environmental audio effects, and others.

Edited by lowenz

Task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody see. - E.S.

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