@Oluseyi - I understand what your point is, but Microsoft should have made this issue clear. They have done things like this in the past and should have learned from them. From my reading in "Writing Solid Code" by Steve Maguire, he recounts a tale (pg 69 for reference) when MS shipped a beta debug version of Excel to its beta testers. They stopped doing this after a a 'prelease' magazine wrote how great the program was but also how it was "about as fast a a three-toed sloth". In their best intrestes, I would personally like to see a disclaimer that explicity makes the point that this indeed is just a beta so not everything is packaged. I'm not saying I felt that way, its just I saw other people who reached that conclusion on, as you say inadequate information/experience, or even ignorance, so I totally agree, but remember how dumb the masses are [wink].

In all honesty, I have no bad remarks in regards to Win32. I like the windows api features that is provides. I also like using MFC as well, even though it is dismissed as horrible on GD. I use it for quick and easy gui's for testing out various components. I feel that everything does have its uses. Right now I'm using it to test out my audio library. I understand that .NET is probabally better and faster than Win32 and ad infinitum of arguments, but I have not made that change, and probabally will not for a bit, but I do agree with the point that this is GameDev, and is meant for games, not general programming.

Anyways thanks for your feed back and such. I hope I have not come across as a fanatic of any sort. I am more the type to just use what's avaliable and use what I have the most experience with.

@Dan - Don't get me wrong either about OpenAL. I think it's great, but there is a lack of resources that tells how it really is supposed to work. From all of the GD and DevMasters tutorials, I was under the impression that you could have a source and buffer from all your sounds, but only 32 being used at once (source wise). What I was doing, modeling from those tuts, was always creating sources and destroying sources. This worked fine until I was at about 100+ sounds, then the whole thing just died. After 5 rewrites, I have finally found a really nice solution I am looking forward to for using, but I still have some more work to do. Maybe I am the one to blame for misinterpreting everything so saying what I did was unfair to OpenAL, but I misinterpreted it from what was avaliable, which really is not much.

More of the problems I had was the fact that you can only use 16bit or lower sounds for it to work. I did not know this at first, so I was just using 24bit wavs I converted from MP3's. Figured that out after looking at the tutorials again and opening the sound files and seeing how they were all 16bit. I do not know if this was stated somewhere or I just missed it. I did however, print out all the avaliable resources on it and looked for it. Next was the fact that I have to use mono-channel files to get position and spatial coordinates to work. For so long I was using stereo and it did not work, so I looked at the tutorial wav files again and saw they were mono. I do not know if I am doing something wrong with the stereo files, but I thought they *should* work.

That was the main basics of why I said it is a pain, but I probabally should have said it 'was' a pain. I have no problem having to figure things out on my own, of which I have done so a lot. I have also used the mailing list as a reference point to any problems I have had, but I have yet to mail them. That is how I found how the 'AL_SOURCE_ABSOLUTE' is deprecated and was the cause of issuing an unsupported command to alSourcei. Last of my gripes was my issues trying to get alcSuspendContext to work, but never could. That problem has yet to be resolved in all of the refrences I have checked.

I am not trying to start a "bash" Product X discussion, but I'm just sharing my experiences and why I have said the things I have. Hope they make sense, and if not, feel free to tell me [smile].

- Drew

[Edited by - Drew_Benton on February 8, 2005 5:36:17 PM]

Quote:Original post by Drew_Benton
Anyways thanks for your feed back and such. I hope I have not come across as a fanatic of any sort. I am more the type to just use what's avaliable and use what I have the most experience with.

No problem, and not at all. That's the way it should be.

Cheers.

@Drew_Benton

I guess a few of your problems were down to a case of not RTFM [wink]
I dont know if its relivent now but you really should have a copy of the pdf OpenAL Programmer's Guide.
For example, on the sound positioning problem on page 7 it notes:
AL_ CHANNELS number of channels in buffer, > 1 is valid, but buffer won’t be positioned when played

Granted, the bits arent covered, however I'd have thought 16bit was pretty much the standard *shrugs*

Well that's the thing buddy - I did RTM as well as scoure google for weeks! Not only that I printed it out as well as all of the DevMaster tutorials and read those as well. I will check that page 7 again though, I might just have overlooked it - that or did not make the connection at the time I read it. [wink] Thanks for that heads up though.

[edit] You're right. It's right there [lol]. I'm guessing I did not make the connection that it was referring to mono but rather something else. Oh well, I should re-read this stuff again to see what else I missed [embarrass].

- Drew