Author Topic: OpenAL32 or oal_soft  (Read 1963 times)

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Offline mjn.mixael

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OK, I've poked around with this forever and I have never really understood what is the correct setup. Should I be using OpenAL or OAL Soft? I remember something about having to rename oal_soft.dll to OpenAL32.dll to get FSO to see it or something. Yes or no?

Where all do I need the dll installed? FSO directory... system32?

Is OpenAL the reason my new computer has reverb in FSO? None of my other games do that and I can't find any sound card related settings that might cause it.

Links to the actual place to download the right dll would be helpful.

EDIT: Is there still some trickery needed to get wxLauncher to read the proper OpenAL dll? I used to have to put the dll in wxLauncher\bin as well.
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Offline AdmiralRalwood

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OpenAL Soft lets you use the new audio code, so is probably preferable.

Download link is here. You want the Win32 binaries, and you need to rename it to OpenAL32.dll. Then you can either put it in system32 or SysWOW64 (despite the name, \Windows\SysWOW64\ is where 64-bit versions of Windows keep the 32-bit system libraries), or put it in your Freespace 2 folder and your \wxLauncher\bin\ folder so that wxL and FSO use it while your system can continue to use Creative's OpenAL DLL.
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Offline mjn.mixael

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Thanks. Other than really obvious reverb in mission, all my audio related issues are resolved.
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Offline jg18

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Hmm, enhanced soudn shouldn't cause any reverb. You're using OpenAL Soft, right? You're using the most recent version (1.16.0)?

The reverb occurs on all missions, including retail without mods? If you remove your OpenAL Soft customizations (I forget the name of the config file), is the reverb still there? If you disable enhanced soudn (Audio section of the launcher flags), does the reverb go away?

 

Offline mjn.mixael

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This is a brand new computer, so unless something somewhere created an OpenAL config file, I don't have one. I'm using OpenAL Soft 1.16.0.

Reverb occurs on No Mods. Reverb occurs on regular OpenAL. Reverb occurs with enhanced sound disabled.

Here's a video with No Mods. Listen to the briefing speech and then compare that to the in-mission dialog. It's pretty obvious. It also seems like the reverb may not be applied to weapon and other SFX in mission.. but that's hard to tell.


EDIT: Fixed the embed.
« Last Edit: October 18, 2015, 04:27:04 pm by mjn.mixael »
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Offline niffiwan

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That's quite odd.  IIRC, the "Enable EFX" option in wxL is the flag to enable "EAX style audio environments". The default environment is EAX_ENVIRONMENT_BATHROOM which sounds exactly like what you're getting. However, I saw you mention on IRC that you don't have "Enable EFX" checked so I'm quite confused as to why that's occurring. I guess you could trying checking it and see if that makes a difference?
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Offline mjn.mixael

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Yeah I didn't have it checked.. then I played around with checking/unchecking it last night and didn't notice anything. So just now I checked and unchecked it to, ya know... try and make sure the proper flag is set and whattya know. The reverb is gone!
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Offline niffiwan

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 :confused:  I think that the EFX setting is in the registry rather than a command line option, so maybe admin-or-not privs broke something.  But if that's not it I've got no idea what caused that behaviour!

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Offline mjn.mixael

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It probably did that just to give us another bit of motivation to remove that registry crap. :p
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