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OpenAL causing crashes with older drivers

by Josh Welber · in Torque Game Engine · 12/14/2004 (4:05 am) · 3 replies

We have gotten some reports of openAL causing crashes on systems using motherboard RealTek AC97 hardware and older drivers. While updating drivers seems to fix this, we are also told that other TGE games, like Marble Blast and Orbz, play fine on the same machines. So, the question is really about trying to figure out what we are doing wrong, and how we can do it right.

Generally, the game will crash either when it loads in the audioProfile.cs file, or when it first loads up 3d sounds (i.e. when a level loads). We are trying to get some hardware here that will allow us to replicate that crash, but in the meantime are wondering if others have experienced this and what they might have done to protect against it.

We are shipping the game with openAL32.dll version 9.9.1 -- and the game uses 3D and none 3D sound (music). Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
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Torque Owner Edward Gardner
#1
12/14/2004 (5:44 am)
I know at one point, those games were using older openal binaries. That could explain the discrepancy.

I know we (Lore) are using an odler one, will have to check the version though.

Torque Owner Josh Welber
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#2
12/14/2004 (5:49 am)
Yup -- the (working) games use 9.8.9 (some of them) but I *think* at least some use 9.9.1 like us -- although that may just be in the builds we. In any event, once we have a machine that we could test on switching to 9.8.9 is definitely an option. Problem for now is that *both* work fine on all the configurations we have available.

Torque Owner Eugene Goh
#3
12/14/2004 (8:39 am)
Windows machines only perhaps? I came accross this bug sometime before. If you scale pitch down to absolute 0, Creative's OpenAL implementation crashes. Other OpenAL implementations don't. I'm not sure if Creative has since updated their libraries to fix this.