Hi all, As the subject states I'm looking for some feedback regarding the audio support in Mysteries of the Ancients beta 19 as this seems to be a point of contention for a number of Windows users. I know that many of you are part and partial to Microsoft DirectSound, and some of you have out right called the new FMOD Ex support aweful, crap, etc. At this point I'm not sure how to resolve this issue for yu guys as I am still pretty knew to FMOD and I'm trying to convert the way FMOD Ex pans audio to something that emulates or sounds like DirectSound. In that I have not been too successful to date. However, that does not mean we are out of options. Just that the solutions here are not that apealing right now.
The first and simplest solution is to accept the way things are. As for me personally the way FMOD pans sounds isn't a big deal. It doesn't bother me, and sounds good enough. However, I realize from the on and off list messages on this topic many of you don't like it at all. The alternative solution would be to split the Genesis engine into two different engines. One built specifically for Windows users and one specifically built for Linux users. This has both pros and cons that need to be weighed carefully. The up side of building two specific engines for each platform is that I could make use of native APIs for each platform. On Windows I could use DirectInput, DirectSound, the Win32 API, MS Sapi, etc where on the linux side it would use LibSDL, OpenAL-Soft, Speech-Dispatcher, and so on. That sounds good in theory, but is nothing short of a nightmare to manage. The down side is in many of the cases comparing APIs is like comparing apples and oranges. I'll have to write various wrappers to convert things back and forth between APIs so the game code will compile on either engine without a great deal of modification on my part. That will take considerable time to add and will delay the release of games like MOTA even further even more than it already is. Which is not something I look forward to doing at this point in the development process. The final option or solution I can see here is not necessarily to make two different game engines, but take some time away from MOTA, Raceway, etc to write a custom sound API for the G3D engine. It might wrap DirectSound or XAudio2 on the Windows side, and wrap OpenAL on the Linux side. This seems to me to be the right solution, but would take a good couple months or more to develope as I'd have to wrap two different sound APIs and then expose them to the G3D engine through a single universl API the way Streemway wraps DirectSound and XAudio2 for the BGT engine. In either case it is important that I get this issue sorted out pretty soon as licensing FMOD Ex will take about a third of my expected income from sales, and I don't want to really do that if end users are really that unhappy with it that I might loose sales or it will detract from the games I write using the Genesis 3D engine. I'm not sure what to do here as FMOD Ex has a good reputation, has a lot of advanced features that blows DirectX away, but I'm unable to figure out how to get it to pan the way DirectSound does which is why people are complaining about it. If there is a cheaper solution we can all agree upon then I'm willing to give it a try. Thanks. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
