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Game Sound

Started by DrEvil Jun 24, 2004 at 4:52 PM 4 replies 650+ views

Original Post

Jun 24, 2004 at 4:52 PM

I've been told by a pretty good coder that for a game sound systems, that it's inefficient to use openAL for instance for all the sounds in the game, because even things such as menu sounds and other 2d sounds will go through 3d processing. He mentioned that a better way to do it would be to use OpenAL for 3d sounds, and use straight Directsound or the equivilent for 2d sounds. Does anyone have any thoughts or experience with this and know if this is in fact true, or if sounds can be played in OpenAL without any of the 3d processing(he says no, I'm just going by that until I get time to look into it myself). Thanks for the help. J

DrEvil

Jun 25, 2004 at 12:16 PM

anyone?

NLDEV

Jun 25, 2004 at 2:16 PM

I would just use OpenAL for all your sounds, 3D and 2D. It's sort of silly to use two different APIs for 3D and 2D sound. In fact, OpenAL supports DirectSound as a backend, if I'm not mistaken.

And you can rig up 2D sound without much trouble.

TangentZ

Jun 25, 2004 at 2:24 PM

Quote:
Original post by DrEvil
...because even things such as menu sounds and other 2d sounds will go through 3d processing.

I'd say: don't be silly.

If your game is playing menu sounds, then presumably everything
is paused while the player is choosing some menu items.

It won't matter if you're playing 2D or 3D sounds at that point.
Performance shouldn't even be an issue.

kezz

Jun 25, 2004 at 4:52 PM

Have you considered FMOD (http://www.fmod.org)

DrEvil

Jun 25, 2004 at 7:35 PM

I was leaning toward not even worrying about it also, just wanted to bring it up to see if anyone else has any more insight. It seemed almost like a micro-optimization to worry about 2d sounds going through 3d processing, just wanted to be sure.

edit: yes I've used fmod before, we've commited to openAL though because it's usable in a commercial product.

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