Getting your groove on
It was recently announced (apparently at GDC) that Apple has embraced OpenAL as their "game audio" library of choice. This is actually the NDA-level news we were given back in January at the games kitchen in Cupertino.
Now that it's public knowledge, one of the immediate benefits of this is that Apple's new implementation sits directly on top of CoreAudio. In particular, it features some Apple-specific calls to perform data conversion of samples to the native format when they are loaded (for performance improvements during mixing) as well as doing positional audio through CoreAudio's 3d mixer AudioUnit.
A few of Aspyr's existing games can benefit from this for almost-free. Off the top of my head, I know both Jedi Academy and Jedi Knight 2 can, although it'll necessitate a Mach-O build and thus kick OS 9 users to the curb. I did some preliminary builds of both back at the kitchen to mess around with the new OpenAL, and hopefully before too long I can find some time to finish them off. Now that Apple has made the announcement public, they've apparently released their code into CVS, so we'll be able to distribute the new library. I gather it requires an update to CoreAudio's frameworks, which Apple has said will eventually be delivered in a QuickTime update. I don't know if that'll mean 10.2 and up or 10.3 and up or what.
Comments
I'd wonder how many people still use OS 9 yet have the hardware to run Jedi Academy or Jedi Knight II. I'm running 10.3.3 on an iMac DV with 8MB Rage 128...
Posted by: Alphax | March 30, 2004 02:08 PM
I honestly don't know. Certainly there are some die-hards out there who have decent machines yet game in OS 9 for performance reasons. I suspect their numbers are small, however.
The larger problem, at least with Jedi Knight 2, is that it shipped with explicit support for OS 9. I think we could probably get away with removing that support in a future patch, but it's not my decision to make.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | March 30, 2004 02:27 PM
Well, you can release it as an "explicit OS X Only patch for the specific purpose of including positional audio" As long as it's clear to people before they download why that it is OS X only it shouldn't really be a problem (I hope). You can't support what can't be done. I would so love to play through both JO and JA again with the new OpenAL.
Do you guys have to use Miles libraries in MoH games? I was just thinking that it would probably be helpful to create a Miles wrapper with the new OpenAL stuff so that one might be able to save on licensing the bug plagued Miles libs.
Posted by: a2daj | March 30, 2004 05:28 PM
Just remember THPS2 shipped with both OS 9 and OS X support but no gamepad support or networking in OS X. There's a precedent! ;)
Posted by: a2daj | March 30, 2004 05:30 PM
As JA is Mac OS X (10.2.6 and beyond) only, would that be the title you would patch first?
Posted by: John Hood | March 31, 2004 04:06 AM
you can actually run jedi academy in os9, i do and it performs a lot better
Posted by: bob | May 28, 2004 04:56 PM