Curious about sound in Vista? Look here.

Hello.

I just got back from testing my game under Vista for the second time.

The good news is, it works flawlessly* when using OpenAL.

So if any of you are planning to release your games with Vista compatibility, you'll be wanting to use OpenAL.

Oh, and I don't want to drag this off-topic, but going back to XP after using Vista, feels very drab and dated.

* Well, almost flawlessly. Go here >> http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=68412

yep,the look and ways of Vista pulled me too,it took me a while to offically shrug XP off,but I have! :-)

OK thanks GFK, so will you upgrade your home PC then?

Yeah, I'm sure it's great, but I just can't stomach $200+ for the upgrade just because of the 'eye candy' appeal.

Russell

Well I'd rather spend the money on something else but as a professional developer I'm going to have to buy Vista to test my game framework on it. I'll stick it on another HD and keep XP as well. Sorry don't mean to go too much off topic.

Yeah I need to buy it too but just now, Armadillo has a much higher priority.

The money is all going one way at the moment - be nice to start getting some of it back. :/

I warn you, it takes a while. You'll get money back from your own site the quickest (but make sure you have a decent strategy for getting traffic i.e. Press Release and Shareware submission, don't rely on programmers from forums by God!) and then portals take around 2 months, it's painful but better than if you had to go through a publisher as you could wait even longer!

Hi,

Have you been able to get any DirectSound based apps to work under Vista? Have you updated drivers etc?

DirectSound would probably be my 'preferred driver' on Vista, and it seems to work for most people.

Just a suggestion. You can buy the MS Action Pack and get an upgrade for Vista Businees included. First year is $200 I think and it includes Office, XP and many other great things for your business.

Well, it wasn't my PC so I wasn't too eager to start tinkering with settings and such.

There was sound in Windows itself - I also found a nice lil chess game installed and that had sound too, so I assume drivers and so on are all in order.

I doesn't help that I have no clue about the PC specs, does it? :/

You wouldn't need updated drivers for Vista, since DirectSound is now entirely software driven (ie. no hardware acceleration). From what I understand, this means that if you have sound in Vista, you will have sound for any game that uses non-hardware features (DSP, Positional Audio, etc.) of DirectSound.

You can use something like System Info for Windows to get information on pretty much everything you need to know about someone system (and quite a bit you probably didn't want to know).

For another project I found the maximum size of a directsound buffer on my machine is 0x1000000, which equates to 95 seconds of 44100 stereo 16 bit audio.

The CreateSound dsound call fails for anything bigger which may be causing the entire driver to fail for GfK?

I don't think that's it. I'm not using anywhere near 95 seconds of audio at any one time. Probably not even half that.

I do have about ten minutes of music, but that's streamed by MaxMod - doesn't go anywhere near Directsound. May be causing some sort of conflict though?

Wish I could test this further :/

Does anyone notice their sound is a bit "muffled" under OpenAL? Not all sounds are, but certain samples that are crisp and bright under the Default driver are very quiet and "smothered" sounding in OpenAL.

Have not tried it on Vista or Mac- this is a WindXP observation.

I have a problem with BMax apps that play sounds:
Every sound delays and starts one second later.
This happens only with BMax programs.
So if I add:

PlaySound(...)

I hear the sound one second later than I should hear it.
It must be a bug of the bmax sound module because other apps don't have this problem.
Has someone the same problem?

System: Vista x64, OnBoard-Sound-Chip

Basicprogger: Apparently the default sound driver (FreeAudio) has a 1 second delay in Vista so you have to try Direct Sound or OpenAL as GfK has.

So has most everybody else with Vista when using the FreeAudio driver (the default sound driver), hence this thread. ;o)

Look here for more info (and the docs, of course).

[edit]
Beaten to it...
[/edit]