Re: Help Us Get 3D Audio Back (aka the Libaudioverse thread)
Followup post with info for interested devs after this one:
I am still alive. I am not monitoring the forum beyond these threads.
the reason I have been moving slowly on this is because the PR got ahead of me and I am playing catch up, and a 6-month project just landed and I had to document it and am now following something like 4 threads for it, each much larger and more technical than this one. In terms of priorities, this is the one that's literally letting me claim I've got code in use by Dropbox and Google. In terms of practicalities, getting a remote job is currently my best option. For any devs who are curious, optimizing Rust struct layout. This post is already over 6000 views, and it looks like it could top out around 10000. Some of these people hire.
Libaudioverse was misadvertised, primarily because I did not stay on top o f it from the non-developer perspective over the last 3 or so years. 3D audio is something it does, not what it is. You can also use it for a lot of other stuff like instrument synthesis; when midi is added, you'll be able to even play directly from the keyboard. Or making voice changers, once it's got microphone support. Or researching new reverb designs. The graphing calculator is a more important demo than the FPS because the accessibility people like to fund projects like that and there is almost no money in the audiogaming community for anything, let alone something that isn't directly a game. If there is a community I am going to make the priority, it's the one where there's people who routinely fund projects with much loftier funding goals than mine. Either I can get someone to fund Libaudioverse directly, or I can get someone to fund the graphing calculator and then fix Libaudioverse bugs and such directly related to the graphing calculator. But either way I end up with money, the thing I produce with the money is valuable, and the money moves me towards specific goals I want to move towards.
The first primary difference from Steam audio is that it is open source. Again, I imagine that few people here care about the philosophical debates in the programming community around this, but suffice it to say there are people for whom "This project is free and open source software competing with these things from these corporations over here" is a compelling story, and again some of them do have large sums of money. There is a potential plan to get it in front of a large number of these people; I can't discuss specifics because some of it involves information that's not public knowledge as of yet.
The second difference from steam audio--perhaps the more important one--is that I skimmed their manual and could not immediately work out how to use steam au dio. This says something. I probably can figure it out, but I can't figure it out instantly despite being extremely qualified. I do not believe it loads files. As far as I can figure, it's specifically designed to integrate into something that already provides the other services an audio engine needs like file input and sound card output, and also you have to use it with 3D geometries in the format sighted games work with (which we can't work with as blind developers). I may at some point integrate it into Libaudioverse in the same way that you'd integrate it into Unity. Libaudioverse does provide the needed services. But I do have philosophical objections and can probably duplicate a lot of it really easily anyway, and audiogames can't use it even if it is there since our engines are using geometry data that's something like 100 times less complex than what it wants you to use with it.
No one in this comm unity has the skill to go from no code to a working shades of doom clone in less than a week of beyond full-time development (as in, wake up, code every waking moment, go to bed, repeat). You also effectively need a sound designer putting in as much effort. I have asked ctoth for his prototype and art resources because it already uses Libaudioverse and I should be able to upgrade the version inside it in very short order. I am still waiting to hear back.
There will be HRTF demos hopefully this week, plus a big blog post that goes into the mathematics of how it works. I need to make massive improvements to the libaudioverse HRTF, but I need other things to die down and give me the time to work on it. I'm hoping by next weekend; if not, I don't know when because someone invited me to a 4-day conference and I don't have to pay anything except food so you'd better believe I'm going. If this isn't done and written by the 25th it won't be up until after the 30th.
So, a point: I'm trying to fund this so I can put all this other stuff aside for a few months. On the one hand we need demos, and I know this and am doing it. On the other hand, trying to get me to move faster kind of misses the point. I want to. But I am the blind gay liberal atheist in the conservative Christian household in the middle of Florida with no public transportation closer than half an hour, and my additional health issues that have kept me here and unemployed are finally in the final stages of solving themselves (there are things worse than blindness). Leaving is consequently a major immediate improvement in my life, but it requires money and so things which make me money are priority. If Libaudioverse can't make me money then, in the long run, Libaudioverse will be the casualty. I will be disappointed if this happens, but not for long because I'll be busy having an actual life and actual real-world friends and all that nice stuff that I don't have now.
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