Game Studio Open AL Plugin

I made this for myself, and mostly use it with other engines. I mainly wanted the streaming for 3DGS since the built in command has an annoying pause when it is called. This plugin also lets you capture audio from whatever the current default device is.

Any problems questions or requests, let me know.

link: Game Studio Open AL Plugin

Thanks for sharing!

I have a FMOD dll in the works and it is suprising, that the GS media system doesnt allow seamless streams. I am even able to stream 40mb waves without any lag and especially streams from any internet source are most times faster that streaming the same file from HD with the GS media_ commands (requires a broadband connection ).

Did you managed to transform the A6 coordinate system over to OpenAL so that its 3D sound device is working correctly. I have some trouble with this issue on fmod, but the rest works fine for me.

Cheers
Christian

Hey, I use FMOD for my engine, a great library. Well done, Mr. Russell

Doesn't FMOD have a fairly expensive license if you use it commercially? OpenAL is free.

Although the plugin does actually have the ability to play 3d sound effects, I haven't enabled that for 3DGS for the time being. I only needed it to get around the open stream hiccup of 3DGS. I've implemented the streaming sound as full stereo with no 3d effects since I intended it for background music. I don't think there should be a problem with 3d, though, and if the co-ordinate system is different it shouldn't be a major job to convert it.

I also have trouble understanding why 3dgs does that, and JCL doesn't know since he uses Direct Show. My implementation plays sounds and streams in a background thread and uses quite small buffers.

Yes, FMOD is 6.000 USD for 1 license, but for what we have publishers supporting us I first tried openAl, but I had probs with different filetypes, not so beginner friendly. After implementing a handful types, I switched.

BTW what filetypes are supported?

It just streams ogg. You only really need wav and ogg for games, in my opinion. Yes, ogg isn't natively supported by OpenAL, and getting them to work together was a bit of a nightmare. In the future I intend to add speex format for voice files.

Thank's a lot for sharing, Alex!

That's really kind! Finally a medicine against the "the open stream hiccup of 3DGS"!

Thanks, I'm sure I'll find a use for this somewhere. If anyone ever creates a full implementation of OpenAL, let us know.

Same comments as the others, this is indeed a great contribution.
Not sure or I'll use it as OB mentioned, the use of it will be determinated by the future itself for my
But I'm sure many other users will get advantage of it aswell while using it in the nearby future.

Cheers

Frazzle

Thank you, A.Russel. This seems to be extremely usefull. I'd love to see this extended.

Quote:

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In the future I intend to add speex format for voice files.

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@A.Russell: Sorry for the bump, but your PM quota has been reached. I just posted a request for this feature in The Future, but it dawned on me that you mentioned possible support for this via your plugin at some point. As mentioned in my Future post, the savings can be significant for projects involving large amounts of audio (my own title, and the Facade example I gave in the thread....their 800MB d/l shrunk to 167MB after converting to spx format), and I have a free spx encoder/decoder plugin available in dBpoweramp, now (see thread for link).

Anyway, I thought I'd check in since this is an unknown from your end, plus it could be a very long time or never on the Conitec end. If A.Russell doesn't have the time or energy to implement it, I would ask (plead? beg? pretty please? ) someone else to step up and see if they could do it.