New Discoveries regarding OpenAL

[eezstreet]

Apparently, you can run a separate instance of OpenAL within JA, allowing for potentially limitless sound possibilities. Fun stuff. I used it for loading screen music, which then fades away as you enter the game.

[eezstreet]

Well, more advanced sounds in general will be possible. OpenAL has some fancy efx packages attached to it which allow for stuff like reverbation, echoing, fun stuff like that. The only drawback is that you have to find a parser for each format (or read the files from scratch, as I did with .WAV files). My system, while untested with 3D sound effects, will allow you to have music tracks fade in and out (completely impossible in JA), and music play during loaded. It hooks seamlessly with JA. All that coders have to do is use my new register/play functions instead of the standard trap calls. ALSO, you can choose to have more volume filter options (so instead of effects, you can divide it to have gunshots, or you can make vchat use a separate volume slider), allowing you to adjust volume of stuff to be more realistic (gunshots are naturally louder and can be heard from farther away than grenade bounces or whatever)

Also, we can load .ogg files (or any other previously unsupported format for that matter) and play them in JA.

The whole sound quality could be ramped up to a near-cinematic level, with Dolby 5.1 surround support as well. One of the major problems I've had with JA is not the graphics, but that the sound quality is just so incredibly awful and makes little sense. For instance in GSA, the impact sounds are often louder than the original gunshot because the sounds are handled really strangely.