Quote: Original post by Kenbar
From what you've said you won't be able to do this in OpenAL, but other engines have a nice panning feature for stereo sources whereby when you are close to the source you have wide stereo but as you move away it is reduced to mono for greater directionality.

I bet you could achieve that yourself by splitting the stereo audio channels in to left and right and positioning them as you would stereo speakers.

Thanks for the links to those lists SpreeTree, and the acknowledgement of lost devices not supposed to happen. As no one else (this thread or the other one) has managed to recreate the problem, I am guessing it's something to do with the hardware (crappy on motherboard sound) or the way it's being initalised (default driver rather then "DirectSound" or whatever).

I can recreate the problem in other peoples work, and I do loose sound in games sometimes (eg original half-life) if I have to switch to the desktop. Restarting the game brings back the sound.

I'm going to see if new drivers help. FYI the pc has onboard realtek chip alc650 - i think it's branded ac'97. Googling took me to this page.

Quote: Original post by Kenbar
From what you've said you won't be able to do this in OpenAL, but other engines have a nice panning feature for stereo sources.

Your right, you cant pan sources in AL. I think the main reason this isn't included in AL is that is is designed first and foremost as a 3D sound API, and they have cut out a few of the (lesser used?) features for 2D samples.

Quote: Original post by paulecoyote
I bet you could achieve that yourself by splitting the stereo audio channels in to left and right and positioning them as you would stereo speakers.

Forgive me if I am showing my ignorance, but why would you want to do that, or more to the point, play a stereo sample positonally? I personally only use stero samples for music, then you get the effect that the artist wanted from the sample. Positional samples are just that, positional, and should only be heard from the appropriate speaker according to distance and position.

Having said that, your method of splitting the samples channels and playing each one as a mono sample would work.

Quote: Original post by paulecoyote
I can recreate the problem in other peoples work, and I do loose sound in games sometimes (eg original half-life) if I have to switch to the desktop. Restarting the game brings back the sound.

I'm going to see if new drivers help.

From the sounds of it, it could well be a driver issue. If it is, it might be worth posting the findings on the OpenAL-Dev list, maybe the OpenAL creators can find a solution to this?


Spree

yeah I might well do that if the driver update doesn't work. I was more concerned about my 4e4 entry being unstable because of sound - would hate for it to crash because of sound. But as no one else seems to be able to recreate this, I think the chances are pretty small.

As for the stereo sound from 2 mono sources on the map... I don't know if you played medal of honour (I think it was Moh) but one of the multiplayer levels had a radio you could keep on turning on and off. I expect the sound was a mono sample anyway, but it was for some reason quite a fun little toy in the game. It def was positioned in 3d space, though as I said I expect it was mono.

I think sound gets left out of games too much. And it's wierd how sound kind of tries to mirror film... I guess it's natural because it's the closest medium. But James Bond doesn't hear his own theme when walking around corridors and peaking around corners. But sometimes music *is* worked in to films where the character is listening to music, or going towards a source of music.

If a character in a game walked in to a room where another character was watching a film on a 5.1 system blaring out of 5 spealers, then surely you could have 5 mono sources blearing out the soundtrack in the game that the avatar would experience... and the sound change slightly as they walked around the room.

I know that's more of a conceptual thing then perhaps realistic idea for games audio, but I think at some level players would appreciate that kind of audio detail - in the same way they appreciate those pretty visual details.

What I've done in films a few times is introduce the music as non-diegetic (off screen) and then later have the character interact with it, maybe switching off a radio or turning off the engine of the car to make it diegetic. Maybe that could be used somehow, or maybe it'd be too confusing in an interactive environment.

I'll have to double check this with a buddy to make sure Im not nuts, but a friend was working on a HL2 mod when the sound guy got confused, because they found all the HL2 positional audio sounds as stereo samples. I looked into it, and Im pretty sure what I found was that past a certain distance, it would be mixed mono and positioned normally, but when very close, the samples would be mixed stereo in a certain way to provide higher fidelity and realism on the "closeups".

*grain of salt*

No salt required; Sony's SCREAM audio engine on the PS2 supports this feature, so you'd expect that the cutting edge source engine would also have it...

What happens in HL2s case is that one channel has the close sound and the other channel has the distance sound.

If you're a few feet away the stereo file would be mixed mono 90% channel 1 and 10% channel 2. When say 400 feet away the it'll be 10% channel 1 and 90% channel 2.

That's my understanding anyway.

Nice. Crossfading between two samples means you don't need DSP to simulate the distance effect. I've done that for explosions on PS2 and PSP games, but it does of course take up twice as much memory for that particular sound.

Very strange mixing advice I'm seeing. ;)

The way hollywood likes to mix audio is to put the majority of "action" in the center channel. Then the music floods the Left + Right and the Surround channels. If you're mixing a 5.1 song then it depends on what effect you're going for. I'm sure you aren't doing this, but the typical way I've heard it done is to have violins on the front left, basses and cells on the front right, violas on the center channel. Everything bleeds to the surround. Basically you record it as if you're sitting and watching a symphony.

So what you don't want to do is put the music in the back. People with 5.1 speakers (me) will get very irritated to hear music behind them rather than in front of them. It would also distract the player from the game. If you're going to position the music, keep it in the front constantly...unless you throw in an effect. Remember, the music shouldn't be used to distract the player.

So take those ideas and see how you can apply them to OpenAL. Don't forget to post your results. I'm using OpenAL too. ;)

Earlier in the thread we were talking about diegetic music, or music as a sound effect rather than score. For example, the bad guy’s radio units in Far Cry (playing that bongos sample off of the general 6000 series SFX library). To have that come out the front channels alone would be strange…

Nes8bit is talking about non-diegetic music; music as score. Keeping music in the front channels is certainly the way Hollywood likes to mix things – the question is whether that model is applicable to games. We can easily copy that model, but this doesn’t take in to account the differences between the audiences of the two mediums.

Live music, theatre, film and TV all have the screen or stage as their focus. That box, screen or platform, is the entire world that the performance exists in or on. For these mediums, hundreds of years of precedence dictates that everything, including music, comes from the front. There are exceptions, there always are, but for the most part this is true.

With the advent of surround sound in film, early experimentation demonstrated that overt use of the surround channels was distracting to the audience. It takes the focus away from the world of the film (the screen) and in to the world of the audience (the theatre).

In film the audience are voyeurs. They feel a connection to the film world but they are merely observers. When watching a film, if I hear a sound behind me, I may wish to turn around. If I do so I am disconnected from the film, and the spell has been broken.

In games the audience are observers and participants. When playing a game, if I hear a sound behind me, I may wish to turn around. I can do so.

You can disagree with that if you so wish but, unless you play all your surround-enabled games in stereo mode on your 5.1 speaker setup, you’d be a hypocrite.

I guess where my argument falls down is that if you were playing a game and you heard a trombone behind you and you turned round only to discover that it wasn’t there, you may be somewhat confused. Right?

You shouldn’t be. We’re all well aware that non-diegetic music doesn’t exist anywhere in the game world, so why should the direction it is coming from make any difference?

Well, we come back to precedence again here; the orchestra have always been in front of us. But we’ve discovered that having busy surrounds, in terms of sound, is acceptable in games, so what is stopping us from rewriting the paradigm to allow music to come from the sides and rear too. I’m not advocating aggressive use of the surrounds for musical scores in games, but to say that the use of the surrounds for music is wrong ignores the fact that the use of non-diegetic music at all is an abstract concept.

I think you can expect to hear more interesting uses of surround sound in next gen games which are “wrong” by the film model. I’m pretty sure your auditory system will be able to cope.

My $0.02 :)