Requirements of soundsystem

[svenskmand]

As people have been talking about making sounds for the game and AndrewBuck talking about how to implement it I think we should decide on some requirements of this sound system, and then choose a existing system that will fulfill these requirements, as we did when Ogre3D was chosen for the graphics of our game.

I only really have on requirement, namely:
* The system should support multi-channels, e.g. 5.1 surround, or 7.1 surround, actually a flexible system which can support and arbitrary number of speakers would be best, as we can then accommodate any future sound system, like 5.1 and 7.1 are standard now a days.
* This second bullet is not a real requirement, but more a request or dream. I thing it would also be very nice to have very good head-phone support, giving a good spatial feeling, like you get from binaural recordings.

Here is the list of requiremnts we have agreed to in this thread (I will maintain it as we get more requiremnts):

* Support multi-channels, e.g. 5.1 and 7.1, and be flexible enough to support future speaker configuration standards.
* Be cross-platform
* Well documentet

[andrewbuck]

I'm not sure what features they support but I was considering using on of the engines here since they seem to be cleanly integrated with OGRE. This is not necessarily a requirement though since sound is really a separate thing and I can call the sound functions myself independantly. My main concern is that there be good documentation/tutorials available on how to use whatever sound library we go with. Also the library needs to be cross platform, the rest of the codebase is and I don't want to sacrifice that now. I will leave the choice of audio engine mostly up to you guys, however of course I will have to have final say on what ultimately gets coded up (since I will likely be the one doing it), but anything that meets the above requirements should be fine with me.

-Buck

[svenskmand]

Yes documentation an cross-platforms is also must have requirements , I will maintain a list, in my first post, of what we put in as requirements.

I'm not sure what features they support but I was considering using on of the engines here since they seem to be cleanly integrated with OGRE.
...

Of the two listed here it should be OpenAL as it is free software, as opposed to FMOD. Also Unreal Tournament have used OpenAL in a long time and I think that the sound in these games is good (from a spatial point of view). And I suppose it is well documented also, as it as been used in many commercial games. And it is cross-platform.

[svenskmand]

So Andrew have you decided on a sound system yet?

[andrewbuck]

Not really. Someone mentioned OpenAL and I think that is fine. The issue is not so much what engine to use but how to integrate it into the code. I have never done much at all with sound so it is unfamiliar to me.

-Buck

[svenskmand]

Ok, well I look forward to hearing my samples in the game at some point