OpenAL 1.1

Brad Fuller brad at sonaural.com
Sun Mar 13 18:26:15 UTC 2005


Mark P. McCahill wrote:

>
> On Mar 13, 2005, at 3:26 AM, karl wrote:
>
>> Brad Fuller wrote:
>>
>>> The Game Developers Conference ended this week and Creative 
>>> discussed OpenAL 1.1. This new version includes some extensions that 
>>> may be beneficial to me and potentially to others. In a previous msg 
>>> Mark mentioned that OpenAL plugins have been made and are used in 
>>> Croquet. I have a few questions:
>>>
>>> * How can Squeak users obtain the plugins and use it in our current 
>>> images?
>>
>>
>> There are several changesets in this folder
>> http://hedgehog.software.umn.edu/croquet/Jasmine/updates/
>> I think the main stuff are in
>> http://hedgehog.software.umn.edu/croquet/Jasmine/updates/0214OpenAL.cs
>>
>> The plugin in various platform versions is in
>> http://hedgehog.software.umn.edu/croquet/NICT/install/
>>
>> I dont know how much massaging this is going to need file into a 3.8 
>> image.
>> Karl
>>
>
> If someone wants to try this, let me know. The developers here at the
> University of Minnesota will do what we can to help, but our main
> focus is Croquet.
>
>
>>> * How can OpenAL plugins be integrated into 3.9 to be available for 
>>> all?
>>
>
> I'm still wondering what the process is to get things like this added.
>
>
>>> * Has there been any discussion regarding extending the plugins to 
>>> OpenAL v1.1?
>>
>
> The interesting part of the press release said:
>
>    "The newly proposed OpenAL 1.1 specification will feature three
>     primary improvements over the current version: audio recording
>     functionality for use with in-game voice chat; an offset feature
>     that will allow developers finer control over audio playback;
>     and an additional volume fall off model that will save developers
>     effort in customizing their audio engine. OpenAL 1.1 will be
>     available for developers in summer 2005."
>
> Voice chat is something we deeply care about for the Croquet work we
> are doing. Right now, for live chat we are copying the bits that
> make up the audio more than we would like, and end up with more latency
> than is optimal. It would be nice if there was a squeak VM primitive
> that easily allowed for buffer objects optimized for being low-latency
> so we could hand pointers to the buffer to the OpenAL playback. We have
> been thinking about looking into this approach but are are not yet
> actively doing anything about it.  It sounds like there could be
> another approach in OpenAL 1.1, but I'm not clear on when that code
> will be available from the OpenAL people.
>
>
>>> * To facilitate the migration from 1.0 to 1.1, the OpenAL community 
>>> is providing a few extensions to v1.0. One of the main issues of 
>>> OpenAL, for me anyway, is that it does not have facilities for 
>>> recording. Fortunately, this has changed in v1.1. The 1.0 recording 
>>> extension is: EXT_capture. Has anyone started work on this or on any 
>>> other extensions? (more info on extensions: 
>>> http://openal.org/extensions.html)
>>>
>
> Does anyone have access to the OpenAL 1.1 code yet?
> From the press release it sounded like we would be
> waiting till summer.

I asked the same question, Here is my question and Garrin's reply:

>> Are the extensions available to start working with? I'm look 
>> specifically for the capture extension.
>
>
> It depends on the extension.  In the case of the capture extension, 
> the only implementation that behaves the way I described is Ryan 
> Gordon's Mac OS X implementation at http://icculus.org/al_osx/ (Ryan 
> will correct me if I got the wrong link, but I think that's the right 
> one...).  Ryan implemented capture for use with UT2004/Mac, so it is 
> well tested.
>
> All the extensions that I know of in the mainstream codebase are 
> listed at http://www.openal.org/extensions.html -- you'll note that 
> there isn't much overlap, even though many of the new features for 1.1 
> appear in one implementation or another. 

So, it appears that the extensions that are available (in the list, 
above) are in the mainstream codebase.

brad



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