[Bf-committers] SDL versus OpenAL

[Campbell Barton]

Hey Guys.
 From a quick look and some expierence.
SDL Sound: Basic stereo sound API - does most things youll ever want for 
a game, well supported by SDL guys which seems to release every so often 
and have active dev.

OpenAL- 3D Sound Developed by Loki games (Died in the arse ages ago) Dev 
was ment to continue though seems slow (there are 3 implementations 
AFAIK- I did some stuff with it a while back 2 yrs? - Original from 
Loki, Creative's and another independent one I cant recall the name of)
Creative SBLive have EAX OpenAL accelerated sound but there the only 
company that do it. Apparently documentation is poor. (On the OpenAL 
page there were only 2 examples of apps that use it (omitting blender))
- Examples of usage is 3d positional audio, (would work on 5.1 sound 
systems) , Doppler (blender uses this) - SDL Sound would not be able to 
do these if OpenAL was dropped.

I cant work out of develoment has stopped- Read the dev archives, seems 
people are talking,
Seems like 1.1 was released 2005, 5 years between v1.0 to 1.1 could maen 
close to discontinued :/
http://opensource.creative.com/pipermail/openal-devel/

Personally I don't think OpenAL sould be a dependency, what about 
IF/DEFS so SDLSound can be default?

Downloading the latest OpenAL 1.1+ now from the CVS...
- Cam


Tom M wrote:
> intrr has SDL sound instead of OpenAL in his instinctive blender tree,
>
> intrr - could you outline the advantages this offers?  Also are there
> any disadvantages to switching to SDL from OpenAL?
>
> I seem to recall that you stated the code changes are fairly minimal,
> and would improve ease of maintenance.  Also a number of nice features
> for the game engine - how does it affect sound in the sequencer
> though?
>
> Also would it be possible to create a patch for testing?
>
> Thanks,
>
> LetterRip
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>   


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Campbell J Barton

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