Whither OpenAL?

delYsid asks: "About a year ago, Slashdot had a story about the OpenAL project by Loki and Creative. There was much hype around it. But if you check their website now, the last changelog entry appears to be from December of 1999! Does anyone know of a good (preferable platform independent) library for 3D audio? The only answer I get when I ask professionals in this field is DirectX. I'd love to have my app under Linux instead of having to move to Win again. Any pointer or hints about the current status of OpenAL? Are there any alternatives?" Update: 09/18 15:33 PM GMT by C :Corrected the link which referred to Slashdot's previous story on OpenAL.

I forwarded this question on to Loki, and here's the response from Scott Draeker, president of Loki Games:

As you can imagine, everyone is pretty busy right now, especially as we had some folks out on vacation the last couple of weeks. So I'm sorry about the slow response.

In answer to your question, work on OpenAL continues. Creative has already added EAX and hardware acceleration to the Mac and Windows versions, and are working on adding both to the Linux implementation as well. Work is also continuing on an OS X port as well as other OSes. OpenAL continues to be the sound API which Loki uses in all of its products, and many other companies are either using or evaluating OpenAL for their products as well.

Hope that helps.

So there you have it, straight from the source. Development is progressing, although it's likely to be a bit slow at present. Here's hoping we'll hear more updates on the progress of OpenAL, over the next 6 months. Thanks a bunch for taking the time to answer, Scott!

alternative media api: OpenML

[mysticbob]

another initiative to create an alternative cross-platform media api is currently underway under the name OpenML. OpenML is a merging of several media apis from SGI and others. the specifications have been released, and whitepapers, specs, and presentations are on the OpenML website [khronos.org].

Why OpenAL sucks

[Snocone]

The inimitable Ian Ollmann (who brings up Mac implementation issues on the mac-sound-dev list often) has an interesting piece on why OpenAL sucks here. [macworld.com] For the link-shy:

http://maccentral.macworld.com/storyforum/forums /2 001/07/02/music/?read=55

The relevant portions read

Two things are holding such people back from making more substantial contributions to OpenAL. First of all it is not entirely clear to me that the API is all that well designed. Modelling it after OpenGL was probably a mistake. In addition, there are certain fundamental assumptions put into the API that assume preemptive multitasking for some things to work well, most notably spooling file play. There was no thought put into using it for anything other than 3D sound effects for games. So, for example if you attempt to write a MOD player using OpenAL to hopefully be able to take advantage of their SoundFont technology and EAX in your MOD player's core and reverb functionalities, you are pretty much out of luck. OpenAL's source queues lack the functionality required for doing proper timing of various effects that you would need in order to pull it off.

The other problem is that the designers of OpenAL dont want to fix these problems, or let 3rd party developers do it for them. I have argued passionately for months for API improvements such as queue completion callbacks, defered object deletion and a more extensible API to make the library more generally useful for applications and operating systems other than 3D games on linux. I have been unable to convince them to make even the smallest changes to the spec. So, really until we can get some more flexibility and input into the API design, it is somewhat unrealistic to expect me or any other third party, including Apple, to be able to do much for OpenAL.

PLIB isn't that good

[HelloKitty]

I tried plib about a year ago, and OH MY GOD, it was BAD!!!

It supported (get ready):
- 3 simultaneous voices
- 8 bit mono (only)
- not even 3D sound

Does anyone know if it has gotten better in the last year? Maybe I just missed why it is "so good"?

subatomic -
http://www.mp3.com/subatomicglue [mp3.com]

Re:OSS/3D

[Anonymous Coward]

It is 100% cross platform (available for Windows and UNIX/Linux)

How the hell is that "100% cross platform"? To be "100% cross platform", wouldn't it have to support every platform available?

Supporting Windows & *nix certainly makes it cross platform, yes. It doesn't make it "100%" cross platform though, does it?

Re:Yes, but

[Pierre Phaneuf]

Avoiding preemptive multitasking in high performance single-processor programming is a good idea, period.

Both Quake III [quake3arena.com] and Quadra [sourceforge.net] use single-threaded, non-preemptive sound output with great success, so why are so many Linux/others game developers so stubborn on the idea of putting the sound in its own thread?

Personally, I blame the original Doom port, which everyone duplicated, even though at the time it had big problems of latency compared to the single-threaded DOS version because of latencies in the scheduling of the sound process.

No, threads don't avoid this problem. Thank you for trying, but sorry.

Re:Yes, but

[dinivin]

Avoiding preemptive multitasking in high performance single-processor programming is a good idea, period.

Why?

Both Quake III [quake3arena.com] and Quadra [sourceforge.net] use single-threaded, non-preemptive sound output with great success, so why are so many Linux/others game developers so stubborn on the idea of putting the sound in its own thread?

Because so Q3A's sound sucks compared to other games (such as Rune and UnrealTournament) which use OpenAL under Linux, perhaps?

Dinivin