On Thursday 30 October 2008 06:05:20 am Roderick Colenbrander wrote:
Personally I think that even if OpenAL added the functionality we need that the user experience for most users still won't be good. Most users want to play lets say mp3's while they are gaming. This means that in order to work properly OpenAL under the hood again needs to use alsa+dmix or even worse pulseaudio. For that reason I'm not sure if going directly to OpenAL instead of going through wineoss/winealsa is any better.
winealsa/wineoss would have to do the same, really. With a proper DLL thunk, Win32 OpenAL apps can call directy to host OpenAL, which does have some improvements (namely talking to ALSA/OSS directly, up to 7.1 surround sound output (Creative's only does stereo for software mixing), using host configuration, etc).
DSound on top of OpenAL is a nice idea, IMO, it's just OpenAL's current short-comings prevent it from happening well enough.