After STALKER: Clear Sky failed to generate viable sound output using the existing drivers (in GIT head as of a few days back), I started looking for solutions and stumbled over this thread: http://www.nabble.com/RFC:-OpenAL-Winmm-driver-and-OpenAL32.dll-thunk-was-Re...
I brought the patch up to speed with current Wine to the best of my knowledge and pasted it here: http://pastebin.com/f2a559a22
It appears to make sound work flawlessly in at least one OpenAL-based game, and I suspect there may be more.
In case this driver adds too much of a support/code overhead, would it be possible to add it as a band-aid, until the problem that prevents the other back-ends from working with Clear Sky is fixed?
Thanks for your comments.
--feep
PS: No I'm not running Pulseaudio :)
There is nothing really wrong with a openal32 -> libopenal wrapper but a winmm openal driver isn't that useful. The reason is that since openal in general just uses oss and alsa (yes on creative cards there is a decent backend) which illustrates that our current oss/alsa plugins can offer similar performance. It is just that various parts aren't very optimal at the moment and adding a winmm openal driver is a workaround and leads to another half baked solution (like esd, jack, nas ..).
Roderick