Sounds?

[JC Edwards]

Jim wrote:

...... We have a lot of work yet to do just to get the basic game running up to our standards in single and multiplayer modes.

"Hi Hooooooooooo, Hi Hoooooooooo......Hi Ho, Hi Ho it's off to work we go" :whistle: :whistle: :whistle: :whistle: :whistle: :whistle: :whistle: :whistle:

[Hancock the Superb]

I just wear headphones and the sound comes perfectly to me. For TC2M, of course.

[ironsight]

Jim wrote: The engine as it sits right now has your generic stereo...

Stereo is fine, hopefully it'll be as good as TC2M. Multi-channel audio would be frosting on the cake. In TC2M there is basic sound directionality. When a gun fires to the right of the camera the vast majority of the 'boom' sound does come out of the right speaker and so forth. What i do miss are the true sounds coming from behind the camera.

[norb]

We do use complete directional sound. It's all in the DirectSound library, so I'm not sure how or if DX is told to use extra channels. I can upgrade to a better system, but I don't have time now. Is that the EAX option that does the extra channels?

[Hancock the Superb]

How are you going to get sound like that? Certinly not with headphones. The sound out of them is only 2 dimension.

[ironsight]

Norb, the surround sound formats that have been developed over the years are many and sometimes confusing.

Some audio formats off the top of my head include:
Dolby Digital or sometimes called AC3 utilizes discrete 5.1 audio channels and is used primarily in home movie DVDs.

Dolby Pro Logic is more or less an old audio format now just about obsolete. Basically it uses two stereo channels which require a ProLogic receiver capable of decoding the audio for 3D emulation effects or else it'll just play stereo on an ordinary stereo receiver.

DTS is another 5.1 channel audio used primarily in movie theatres. Some home DVDs also have this as an option.

OOPs, hit submit by mistake!

Dolby Digital Surround EX and THX are also basically 5.1 sound tracks used in movie theatres and home DVDs. There's also a 7.1 extended version

SRS is an old 2 speaker format which emulates 3D sound

There are a few more formats and subformats of the already mentioned which i'm not too clear on.
Which leads us to EAX which was developed by i believe Creative Labs primarily for PC games. Its call to fame as i understand are audio effects such as reverberations, realistic ricochetting bullet sounds, etc. which eventually got incorprated in DirectX. I understand and i could be wrong that Vista no longer supports EAX and is using its Direct3D instead or OpenAL(Open Audio Library) not sure.
This all just gets more confusing as time goes on but its important to note that no matter what format a game or movie DVD uses, the PC audio chip or sound card must be compatible to decode the format in order to take full advantage.

[norb]

Thanks ironsight.

DirectX has moved away from DirectSound and is using something called XACT which is much better, but harder to use. It's a PC/XBOX thing. I will support it sometime in the future, but no time now.