No Sound?

#1 It uses OpenAL, which has the occasional driver/installation issue with some hardware. It's pretty common, but not as pervasive as DirectX (which it generally sits on top of).

#2 What about game compile/exporting? will there be issues/incompabilities?

#3 I think OpenAL gets a bad rep around here... We're using the current OpenAL with a patched up Torque sound system, and it's working great on OSX and Windows.

The Torque sound system is GOOD.. it just has a few show stopper bugs.

-Josh Ritter
Prairie Games

#4 What do i need to do then to make my games the most compatible?

#5 Use directx for your sound

#6 How and where do i change that? New to the sound tweaking, been focusing on landscape editing

#7

Quote:What do i need to do then to make my games the most compatible?

Quote:
Use directx for your sound

This is completely wrong. Torque is a cross-platform development application, and using a windows only sound configuration makes your games less compatible, not more, when you look at Mac and Linux markets.

#8 I just don't want sound issues when I distribute my game, so there is anything I should do?

#9 Rewrite the entire Torque Sound Engine.

#10

#11 There are more than a dozen games that use the Torque sound engine on multiple platforms with little to no issues. Yes, Torque sound is certainly a candidate for a refactoring, but with proper utilization it works fine for just about all scenarios.

I would suggest getting your game up and running, while researching the sound portion of the engine, and simply make sure that you are using it properly as it is designed. OpenAL is very flexible, and the negative impressions some in the community have are from not really spending the time to learn how to use it well.

#12 I've got a shuttle pc with Intel 915G chipset. Not only does Torque not have any sound with the on-board sound card, but most sound play back through the on-board sound card is distorted and garbled. Anyone familliar with this problem?

#13 For Torque sound, I have found that some onboard sound cards as well as WinXP seem to be a bit picky with the OpenAL32.dll you use. Changing the default OpenAL32.dll to the latest one from the creative labs dev site sometimes works (and on other occasions doesnt! so I tend to ship both with the newer one renamed and a readme.txt file with brief instructions)

#14

Quote:This is completely wrong. Torque is a cross-platform development application, and using a windows only sound configuration makes your games less compatible, not more, when you look at Mac and Linux markets.

no its not wrong its absolutely correct. a directx sound system would be most compatible with windows systems. it may be completely incompatible with other platforms, but when it comes to windows, a direct sound system would most definitely work with ALL sound cards and ALL drivers making it the best solution when it comes to windows platform compatibility. maybe openal works like a charm on mac and linux, but obviously there are issues with using it on windows. personally, I plan to use a direct sound system for windows games and openal for other platforms.

#15 You didn't specific windows compatibilty, and stated advice that was incorrect in the context of Torque's primary market: cross platform game development technology.

#16 Yes but that context is completely negated when the default sound system has problems working on the most popular platform. my computers not too old, but i would like the games i write to be compatible with even older systems. how can i be confident in torque for this task if the sounds not working properly for my relatively new system? that sounds like a compatibility issue if you ask me.

#17 As I said above, many games have been released commercially with at most minor modifications to the audio implementation, and work on an extremely varied set of target computers.

Does the audio system need a re-write? Sure. Absolutely. New tech, new capabilities, better and more fully matchable to any existing target computer--all would be outstanding.

However, in the big scheme of things, the work required is much, much less than the work required to get a game to the point where you even need to worry about any of this. For a large majority of platforms and computers, Torque audio works out of the box with little to zero problems.