just brew it! wrote:This is ridiculous.
No it's not. This needs to be said, because the "audiophile" cheapskates need to understand exactly what they've done by not buying soundcards.
just brew it! wrote:Why should people who don't need 3D audio pay for other people to have 3D audio?
Use onboard then. Just don't scapegoat what you've done onto some imaginary software api that doesn't exist because you won't fund it's development.
just brew it! wrote:3D audio was destroyed by Creative's anti-competitive behavior (Aureal, anyone?)
No it wasn't. Microsoft did it. They're the sole party responsible. Creative had EAX 4-5.0 well after Aureal went under.
just brew it! wrote:the confusion caused by their forking of the OpenAL codebase,
What confusion? Creative is/was the main contributor to OpenAL. Their version is solely used to implement support of their card's hardware features. You don't need their version if you aren't using their cards.
just brew it! wrote:and an unwillingness/inability of anybody else to step up to the plate to provide a viable alternative for game developers to rally around.
Because there's no longer money in it ever since Microsoft killed the underlying infrastructure. Don't lie about Creative. The death of Direct Sound 3d was NOT something Creative was responsible for, and it was an open standard with extensions. Sensaura, EAX, and A3d were all extensions of DS3d, and would not have existed without it.
just brew it! wrote:We've had the CPU horsepower to do it all in software for several years now.
So what? If you won't support the developers, this is all wishful thinking.
just brew it! wrote:The algorithms aren't rocket science. What we need is a stable, open API standard that everyone can implement against.
No monetary support, No API.
just brew it! wrote:The Open Source community could do it via the open fork of OpenAL;
It already exists, JBI. Amnesia used it. The problem is that it's not being actively developed, and the new version broke compatibility with the old version. There's all these threads about fixing OpenAL for Amnesia, but it works fine if you just use the older version that was around when Amnesia was first released.
just brew it! wrote:or a game distributor like Valve or game engine developer like Epic could conceivably pull it off; or Microsoft could even do it
Microsoft is the ONLY ones who can pull it off fairly. It actually NEEDS to come from them, as long as we continue gaming on windows. All they have to do is bring back ds3d, although the original version is too outdated, and it needs to be rewritten.
just brew it! wrote:(though they'd probably wreck things by trying to keep it proprietary).
Which is exactly what AMD's doing.
just brew it! wrote:Just throwing money at it isn't going to fix it; if that was the case, the heavy hitters in the industry would've solved this problem already.
Actually, it will. AMD is the heavy hitter, and they are solving this problem. It's just going to be more proprietary junk though. PC gaming needs 3d audio, and apparently this is the only way to implement it, because onboard loving cheapskates won't consider the fact that 3d audio developers have kids they need to feed, and they wonder why 3d audio disappeared. Well, this is why it disappeared. Even if you have a software api, it still needs people to work on it, and you aren't supporting them. Also, all this talk about "CPU horsepower" is bunk. The new consoles have 8 cores, and they use dedicated 3d hardware. So yeah, we probably do still need it to an extent.