Hardware Accelerated OpenAL. (Read: Faster UT2004!)

floam · Last edited by floam on Sun Feb 20, 2005 9:15 pm; edited 7 times in total

A new (hardware accelerated!) implementation of OpenAL has been done by Chris Purnell. It's for people with ALSA and EMU10K1's (Sound Blaster Live, Audigy) only. It works with UT2004, and is faster for me.

I have created a ebuild for those who want to give it a whirl.

It should go in a media-libs/openal-alsa-emu10k1 sub-directory of your overlay.

You can try it out by deleting the openal.so in the System directory of UT2004 and replacing it with a symlink to the new one. If it doesn't work, there probably isn't much you can do about it, it's very new.

To get it doing surround sound read the info it spits out when it's done emerging.
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Malakin · Posted: Thu Jul 01, 2004 8:00 pm Post subject:

I tried this out and here were my results with the demo.

2.2Ghz Athlon XP, Geforce FX5900XT, sblive (duh)

neenee · Veteran Joined: 20 Jul 2003 Posts: 1786

thanks for sharing.

my 'score' with my system compiled openal:

floam · Posted: Thu Jul 01, 2004 10:39 pm Post subject:

A new version came out, this one with better documentation and some more speaker examples. Updated ebuild.
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kriz · Apprentice Joined: 22 Jan 2003 Posts: 231

no sound at all.
the audigy player is my sfx-card
i have changed channels=20 in the ut2004.ini file to term the
SNDRV_PCM_IOCTL_HW_PARAMS error.
but nothing works.
all channels are muted.
:cry:

floam · Posted: Fri Jul 02, 2004 6:47 am Post subject:

kriz: Try emailing the author. Be informative though, he doesn't have enough to time answer "uh sound don't work its broke" emails.
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neenee · Veteran Joined: 20 Jul 2003 Posts: 1786

this newer version works fine for me, though i get the following
error message in the console after ut2004 closes:

center pointALSA lib pcm_hw.c:344:(snd_pcm_hw_hw_params)
SNDRV_PCM_IOCTL_HW_PARAMS failed: Cannot allocate memory

ardnut · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 01 Feb 2004 Posts: 94

sound is very quite and i only get sound out of the front 2 speakers.

ive copied the file into my home dir as:

~/.openal-speakers/speakers-fivepoint-c

is this correct?

Malakin · Posted: Fri Jul 02, 2004 8:14 pm Post subject:

I think .openal-speakers is supposed to be the file containing the speaker info not the directory although the README is rather ambiguous, if that still doesn't work I'd try uncompressing it also since they're gzips.

floam · Posted: Fri Jul 02, 2004 10:29 pm Post subject:

floam · Posted: Fri Jul 02, 2004 10:30 pm Post subject:

neenee · Veteran Joined: 20 Jul 2003 Posts: 1786

PovMan · Guru Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 375 Location: Australia

mate... you forgot to install the quadrophonic preset.... am i the only person in the world with only 4 speakers?

EDIT: !!!!!!!!!!!!!! dude thankyou so much for this. /me hugs floam ut2004 actually has surround sound finally, and it runs at a decent speed with sound.
i'm so happy /cries
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floam · Posted: Fri Jul 09, 2004 8:17 pm Post subject:

Okay, made a new revision which installs the quadrophonic speakers file, sorry about that, PovMan. (By the way, your nick sounds familiar, it didn't used to be PovRayMan, did it? Did you ever use an application called LiteStep on Windows 3 or 4 years ago? If you didn't, just mark me as insane and walk away.)
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neenee · Veteran Joined: 20 Jul 2003 Posts: 1786

if you are PovRayMan i think i remember you as well :wink:

PovMan · Guru Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 375 Location: Australia

You are both insane

The Pov in Povman stands for 'Poverty' not 'POVRAY', and i haven't used windows for more than the occasional game in about 6 years. It's good to have something in common with someone who's... famous.
/me walks away
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neenee · Veteran Joined: 20 Jul 2003 Posts: 1786

lol. oh well - you could have been him :wink:

ZothOmmog · Posted: Mon Jul 12, 2004 6:04 pm Post subject:

I've had very poor luck with this. It tends to crash festival, make voice chat in UT2k4 loop to the point of uselessness, and ocassionally it will hard lock my system entirely while running UT2k4.
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floam · Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 2:36 am Post subject:

Festival doesn't use OpenAL, how does it "crash" Festival?
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PovMan · Guru Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 375 Location: Australia

mmm dum di dum

floam · Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2004 9:06 pm Post subject:

Oops. Fixed and reuploaded.
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grover · Posted: Fri Jul 16, 2004 5:23 am Post subject:

Anybody tried this with Americas Army? I get lots of blips and the pitch of the sound changes as you move around. I've gone back to the original openal for now because the sound quality is just too poor. This is with a SBLive and stereo sound.

kriz · Apprentice Joined: 22 Jan 2003 Posts: 231

ok, brought it to work
but the speakers-fivepoint file i have to edit to bring up the center speaker for my audigy.

0: 1 -0.5 0 0.8860254
1: 1 0.5 0 0.8860254
2: 1 -0.93969262 0 -0.34202014
3: 1 0.93969262 0 -0.34202014
4: 0 0 0 0 <----- this dont work for me
5: 0 0 0 0
6: 0 0 0 0
7: 1 0 0 1 <----- with this setting i get an output from my center

HydroSan · Posted: Sun Jul 18, 2004 12:11 am Post subject:

I notice that the Microphone feature doesn't work, a la Windows' EAX driver. The UT2004 code for the VoIP is still shoddy if it's hardware-driven, so using this driver will most likely break the Microphone.
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floam · Posted: Sun Jul 18, 2004 4:15 am Post subject:

It doesn't "break the microphone", it simply doesn't implement the capture extension.
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