cross-platform environmental audio effects in TDM...

[lost_soul]

I know on Windows you can use EAX 4.0 or whatever it is called, but there doesn't seem to be anything for other platforms. Could reverberation be implemented in TDM through software when the source code is opened? Other games did this in the past: see Unreal. In that game, when you're outdoors and shooting, you can hear it bouncing off of the mountains in the distance. When you're in a cave, it has a much stronger/noticeable echo. Even Half-Life had amazing audio effects when you went under water that didn't require any fancy hardware to do.

 

It doesn't have to be nearly as advanced as one of those hardware solutions, but if a large church hall were to bounce sound around differently than a street, it would add to immersion IMO. Id engines have never really been known for stunning audio capabilities (they used only 22 KHz sound up until Doom 3). That was one area where Epic blew my mind... 48 KHz... 32 simultaneous channels... Dolby Surround... all in 1998!

 

Any thoughts?

[Serpentine]

Any thoughts?

 

I did some digging around on this topic last night after that other thread brought it up... I cant remember which.

 

Anyway, EFX is the open standard which OpenAL supports, you however have to make use of it explicitly, same as EAX. EAX is not supported in pretty much any linux sound driver, however for the older EAX components such as basic reverb and such I think that is supported by some bridge if you use OpenAL Soft, the software driver. I would give that a go for now, assuming your sound is working and correct in other apps remember to backup configs first and remove the normal openal packages first.

 

As for doing it in the mod... not much that can be done really and even if GPL, I doubt there will be much interest in moving away from OpenAL, however converting effects to EFX is quite straightforward from the looks of it. Most games roll their own effects for underwater etc, it's not super expensive(well sometimes) and it doesn't sound as good, especially on higher end cards/headphones and such, there's also a lot of filters floating around the web that provide loads of effects/ideas.