#1 2015-12-01 16:14:14

Hiradur
Member

Better positional audio -> OpenAL Soft backend?

What always bothered me about the Cube Engine is that despite it's advanced rendering capabilities and innovative octree system it was always lacking on the 3D audio side. AFAIK it's using SDL Mixer which is not competitive at 3D audio.

So I'd like to request to implement OpenAL Soft which is a powerful 3D audio API. It has high-quality algorithms for resampling and 3D posititioning. Algorithms are optimized and have intrinsics for various instructions sets such as SSE and AVX. It supports surround system setups and HRTF.

I've been an 3D audio nut since the 90's and have tested all major attempts at 3D audio such as DirectSound 3D, Aureal A3D, QSound, Sensaura 3D and AMD TrueAudio.
IMO, from the end user/listener perspective, nothing beats OpenAL Soft. It's available on any platform, doesn't require specific hardware, is free/libre, has state-of the art 3D audio, high quality filters, OpenAL EFX for simulating environment reverbation and HRTF.
HRTF can be enforced for any OpenAL app or requested by apps and there are over 50 compatible HRTF data sets available to find one which suits your head best.

Better positional audio would not only make games more immersive but can also influence gameplay (games could explicitely make use of positional audio in game design but even if they don't it'll at least have an impact on competitive play).


Links:
Official site of OpenAL Soft: http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html
OpenAL Soft repo on GitHub: https://github.com/kcat/openal-soft

I got a demonstration video of HRTF with OpenAL Soft here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtFatWeEvGY

In reality the effect is much better though because audio compression kills the HRTF effect and also you are not reacting to the sounds yourself but instead "your" reaction is predetermined by the video.

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#2 2015-12-02 11:22:52

eihrul
Administrator

Re: Better positional audio -> OpenAL Soft backend?

It might be something I look into in the future, given the current state of SDL. But, right now at least temporarily I am focusing on polishing up Sauerbraten, so my time is a bit limited to devote to Tesseract just yet.

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#3 2015-12-02 19:10:40

Hiradur
Member

Re: Better positional audio -> OpenAL Soft backend?

@eihrul: I wasn't expecting it to happen anytime soon but I'm happy to hear you are considering this.

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