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.