When you realize that game developers cucked you out of real 3D binaural audio

so who ruined it? who ruined the patents?
creative on aureal?

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this all changed with windows vista. for god knows what reason, microsoft forced a proprietary software layer between the game and the sound card, called DirectSound. this system forced software to digitally mix its sound signal into channels before it could be passed on to the DAC and amplifier. this meant that directional audio for games had to be done for 7.1 speaker setups instead of mixing to purpose. essentially, with the loss of OpenAL and the forced use of Direct3d, there is no longer positional audio in games, only directional. directional sound is now also only in a 2d circle, sounds don't sound higher or lower, and certainly can't go over, under, or past the player like it used to. just circle the player from 7 defined points in space.

got this from reddit

but, like i said earlier, these X-Fi cards reintroduced hardware OpenAL processing, and also created a tool that swapped out the audio code in game engines for an OpenAL interface, effectively bypassing the Directsound software layer and once again passing all the raw information directly to the sound card.

but for whatever ridiculous reason, Creative, perhaps out of habit, refused to offer direct HRTF mixing and instead used the established workaround of mixing to 7.1 and then emulating that on the headphones through downmixing.

so, we came THAT CLOSE to finally having GOOD 3d sound in our games. and then creative fucked it up by not only clinging to downmixing, but using a godawful THX downmixer that's absolutely horrible. what's worse is that Creative actually bought the rights to real HRTF technology, made a card that could have used it, and then pretended the technology didn't exist.

Shit, sound this familiar and I almost forgot how older sound system worked like.

...

WE HAVE BEEN WRONGED!

Does this stuff exist in OpenAL because at least when you're running Thief in Wine with that as the audio backend, it has the positional audio stuff. Not sure whether it matches up in all respects though.

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No, because It only works most effectively with headphones and i play my games with speakers, I play my h games with speakers.
stupid nigger, you only need to read one book about low level audio or use audio libraries made for 3d games

What are you even talking about, user? You don't make any sense.

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OP is a cock sucking faggots that isn't aware of the history of Creative Labs sueing all of their competition out of the market and then buying all their opponents patents and code, only to sit on it and do nothing with it. Then Microsoft came along and killed the DirectSound3D API, which made Creative Labs Sound Cards useless and thus kill all 3D audio advancements since then.

Game developers had nothing to do with it.

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Anyway I knew about that story. I just didn't remember the details, so thank you for posting it.
Now if only an user could post that one webm from unreal tournament (or was it quake?) with that fully virtual 3D audio sound and we are all good.

sourceforge.net/projects/hesuvi/

This is a program that takes 7.1 sound and uses it to emulate binaural sound for headphones. It's not nearly as good as real physical-based audio, but it's a lot better than plain stereo for things that weren't made with much care.

Does it work with games?

If they can output a 7.1 signal.

What is a 7.1 signal and how do I check which games have it?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7.1_surround_sound

Most games can. Check the audio settings.

So is it really that easy? Just run the program and you get awesome sound?

I wouldn't call it awesome but it's an improvement. Follow the directions.

Why isn't everyone using it, user?

Shitty sound is not a problem a lot of people are aware of. PUBG and Fortnite are actually changing that, there's been a rash of videos about VeSuVi recently. Microsoft also added a similar feature to Windows 10.

Still not nearly as good as the webm I posted though.

When we're talking about topic of windows 10 does the virtual surround sound embed in win10 changes anything? I tried using it but it doesn't make a difference in most games, do i need some special kind of headphones in order for it to work?

I don't know, I don't use W10. You shouldn't need anything special though.

Do I need to turn on some option to make that feauture you are talking about work?

Yep, physical-based sound is the goal, everything else is just trying to make the best of the trash we have.

Go to sound output devices (the list with all your speakers/headphones) and go to properties of desired device, the last page on the top is "surrounds sound", the options are there

In the Geräte-Manager you can't do that, but under Sound - Eigenschaften I have the following options:

I don't think virtualization means surround sound, because that term has its own meaning.

Better sound doesn't come across well in magazine pictures so publishers prioritized graphics, if you are only learning this now then welcome to actually paying attention to vidya.

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It looks like this on my pc, language is polish

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Ah thanks, polishbro. It's kinda weird, because I didn't expect them to translate it to German.

I have two options:
Windows Sonic and Dolby Atmos, which should I choose?

I tried windows sonic once and as i said i didn't notice any difference, never used dolby

Give them both a try and see what you like. If there's a way to install other presets, there's dozens of them.

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Wine doesnt have the forced DirectSound. As user explained Vists and later do.

Any unreal game supports it. Deus Ex has it too, and it does wonders when sneaking around.

Linux's sound stack is totally different to Windows though. Wine can use straight ALSA or Pulse which don't do a lot of fancy processing, and using that with Thief will have barebones audio. With OpenAL you can enable A3D and it definitely seems to make a difference in that sounds get muffled through doors, and echo based on environment. I just wonder how thorough it is compared to an equivalent Windows setup.

Still disgusts me that it manages to have better sound design than that full-fledged AAA reboot.

Op is full of shit

There is no patent on Binaural audio as last I checked it was invented in like 1888, the only reason nobodies done anything with it is because when you use shitty headphones it just ends up muffled

Case in point is that Razer/Creative/Dolby all do their own versions of digital binaural sound, and all three of them require at least a 10hz-20Khz headphones to sound great, even 100hz-18Khz can be muffled

There is literally nothing stopping you from making a foam head and setting up two microphones and doing it yourself if you want to create your own binaural recordings

see here:

And he's still fucking wrong

He's talking about the API that creative controlled which was EAX which they owned all the patents too, same fucking shit like AMD not allowed to use specific NVIDIA code pathways like Hairworks etc, and Microsoft at least back then made the right call and told creative to knock that shit off and made Directsound

Nvidia/AMD etc just go over Microsofts head with DirectX and offer game production companies incentives to go only with them, with creative however after EAX got shut out with direct sound all companies just went with their own binaural technologies like I just listed

Again, op does not know what what's talking about

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Audio_Extensions

Hell

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAL

OpenAL completely replaced EAX, and it's free for anybody to use in software form

AND THEY SUUUUUUCKKK

wew

Get better headphones, they work fine

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I want! :(

Sound blaster Z, Zx, ZxR, G5 or whatever else of theirs today that use that chipset

Not the recon though, while it uses that chipshit it's capacitors were really shitty and sound could get muddy, and it was underpowered to boot

I want software like this one

to produce sound like your and the webm in the OP.

I'm a little surprised this thread went without any mention of Namco's patent on minigames during a loading screen. If you were ever wondering why that wasn't a thing, there's your answer.

I just play the video/game/whatever and capture the output with OBS at 320k bitrate mp3 and then sync/convert it to OPUS

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wat

Capture my Sound Blaster G5 output with OBS, sync it back up with video in a video editor

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This makes me angry.

I'm actually interested in this topic but ffs this thread is a mess. Does anyone have a good article or video on the history of sound card and surround sound fuckiness? This seems very relevant to my AGDG goals.

can't someone just make an open sauce alternative these days?

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What does it actually mean then?

Anymore information on this?
I get a pop-in sound whenever a sound starts, so I need to know if this is worth it.

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It's easy to forget that most people have painfully poor attention to detail, even amongst the subset of people who play what might be considered "hardcore" video games (Which is already a minority). For example, the condo I'm living in is unfortunately underneath a third story, and the last person who lived here (whom I gather was some ditz from the magazines I still get in the mail) apparently wasn't bothered enough by the fact that the owner of the place above this one rents his shit out to families that make tons of noise walking around to install actual insulation, so now I'm doing it.

That's what OpenAL is, but it's not really supported by most games as far as I know. Or Windows, really. Creative Labs and Microsoft are like the Nvidia of sound in video games.

I didn't notice how shit sound was until I started playing Thief for a while and noticed it over time.

Yeah, I own several old X-Fi cards, and a A3D card would easily blow them the fuck out, but too bad A3D is killed off by Creative and not as many games support it. As far as I know, a guy on VOGONS is trying to create new drivers for A3D cards so that they would work with old games on new systems.

This. Since then, we're back to square one, and I don't think any of the new developments will become a gaming standard like EAX and A3D once were anytime soon. It hurts like hell that barely anyone gives a shit about sound.

Sounds a bit smoother than the CMSS-3D the older X-Fi cards had, which I use. I do plan to get a newer Creative card, but I'd rather get a used one since I don't want to give Creative any money.

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Dubs confirm.

what game?

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FUCKING THIS
Creative Labs were patent trolls and sued the fuck out of anyone, just to eliminate conpetition. Even though Aureal Semiconductor won in court, All of the legal fees put Aureal out of business.

It's jewery at it's finest, and I'm a fan of Creative Labs' sound cards back in the day. What Creative Labs did was ruin amazing 3D audio on the cheap.

Are you illiterate or did you just skip over the thread?

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Works in Thief 1.

(((Dolby)))

The chinks at (((Creative))) are to blame for hostile takeovering any company that surpassed their shitty EAX technology. They bought out A3D and left it to rot in the ditch.

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Christ that's infuriating

ahahaha open source OpenAL based implementations are fucking Creative so hard, Valve even made an API specifically to fuck Creative
Steam Audio

I'm pretty sure bad company 2 had this when using headphones

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Bad Company 2 was a pretty great game all around tbh.

You should have named it why_patents_are_cancer.png
And kikes say patents "foster innovation" with a straight face as it does the opposite time and time again.
Software patents in particular are at least 10 times more cancerous than normal patents. Here's another example: crApple's patent for something as retardedly obvious as a slide-to-unlock screen.

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apart from the rubberbanding and dice lying to everyone, yeah it was alright

That's about what you have to expect from an EA game.

Bad Company 2 was easily the best in the series.

How fucking new are you?

I get the feeling they'll resort to their old tricks to end that.

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The reason was Creative Labs and their buggy fucking drivers causing BSOD system halts even on the incredibly stable 2k kernel XP started using, which users then blamed Microsoft for. Creative would not fix them, ever, so Microsoft stopped letting audio hardware have direct memory access. That's the reason for the audio abstraction Vista introduced. It was just another in the list of many things Creative Labs ruined.

...

You got it all wrong. DirectSound was the native audio api of windows until Vista. It came with an extension called DirectSound 3D, which allowed hardware acceleration. EAX and Aureal 3D were only possible through DirectSound 3D.
In XP XAudio2 was introduced which was based on XAudio from the XBox 360. Back then it was run through DirectSound. In Vista both apis switched place. Now XAudio2 was the main api and DirectSound was run through XAudio2. Since XAudio2 doesn't support hardware acceleration, DirectSound 3D had to be dropped and EAX stopped working. Aureal 3D would have stopped working too, but there are no Vista drivers for the Cards anyway.
Now Creative developed it's own api called OpenAL to allow hardware acceleration again. The current version of the reference implementation is not open source by the way, but the source code of older version was released. OpenAL also incudes EFX which does the same things as EAX 5.0, but is addressed more similar to the rest of OpenAL.

DirectSound 3D to OpenAL wrapper:
In order to restore 3D sound in games that only support DirectSound 3D there are a few proprietary wrappers available. Creatives "ALchemy" , Asus "GX" and Realteks "3D SoundBack". Sadly there is no notable open source solution.

A3D-Live:
This tools supposedly enables Aureal 3D on any device that supports DirectSound 3D. It's actually fake and just tells the games that Aureal 3D is available. Will do nothing or cause glitches and crashes.

OpenAL soft:
Enables all the features that usually require hardware acceleration and runs them in software. Supports EFX, but no EAX yet. Also comes with a feature called HRTF which does the same thing as Aureal 3D. HRTF can be forced in any game that uses OpenAL!

How long until they get sued, since creative owns OpenAL.

The version of OpenAL that was used for OpenAL soft is open source and LGPL licensed.

Not FOSS so it can fuck off.

That hasn't stopped them in the past.

bump