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News: March 22-28, 1999
Sunday, March 28, 99 FourPoint Surround FPS2000 Digital
For $149.99 Features:
For more info on the FourPoint Surround FPS2000 Digital, check out the march press release. Soldier of Fortune music Spotted this @ VoodooExtreme a little late. The guys over at Tactical Planet spotted a post on the Soldier of Fortune message board, regarding the music in SoF.
Black
and White chat log Will BW be using positional audio and/or 3d sound? Which sound cards will be supported? BW and WW use Russels tremendous sound engine. Positional audio, MP3 sound, positional atmosphere, sound animation, all working on every available card. Black and White will also support EAX. If you have no idea what Black and White is this should give you a clue Black & White is a strategy game packed with features that PC gamers have come to expect from a Peter Molyneux title. From a spired citadel, you survey the surrounding 3D landscape. The game-world is constructed using Lionhead's new, fully scalable, rotating, environment-mapped, modifiable landscape with an engine giving through-the-eye vision, bump mapping, light sourcing and reflections The game is due late 99 and with usual delays it's probably a summer 2000 game. Friday, March 26, 99 EAR Presents: Battlezone IAS now with EAX!!Posted by -Frank - 5:20 pm EST This update is straight from EAR themselves so enjoy. This patch includes: We've also included a very simple function that allows any Posted by -Frank - 5:05 pm EST Digital Illusions has released the Motorhead 3.0 patch (14MB). Found this cool bit on AGN3D. The patch will work for all versions of the game, here is the info: Two new cars released, the "Dominator" and the "Venom". Now it's time to kill those Serpent times :) Make sure you tell the server admins to allow them on the internet servers too, i.e. set UnlockedCars in the "server.cfg" to 14. Thanks to Drunk_Driver and Trix for the tweeking... Fixed a detection problem with the DirectSound3D and Creative Labs EAX sound-systems on some versions of Win95. Fixed a workaround for some soundcard-drivers that made Motorhead crash immediately on statup. Included the latest addressbook with dedicated Motorhead servers around the world. Included the MPlayer(www.mplayer.com) multiplayer system so that everyone can enjoy the fun on the US MPlayer servers. Included 9 ghost-demos recorded by Drunk_Driver, one of the best Motorhead drivers ever. You can learn a lot by watching and ghost-racing him. Included the two cars in carpack1, the "Python Menace" and the "SuperBee". Include the latest Motorhead dedicated server for Win32. Various minor bug fixes. Interview With EAR @ Stratics Grabbed this from 3DAI Uprising Now Supports A3D, And EAX 3DO has released 4 patches for Uprising 2 which optimize the game for AMD Aureal and Sound Blaster Live. You need to choose your patch depending on whether you have a AMD\3dfx, AMD\no 3dfx, Pentium\3dfx or Pentium\no 3dfx, so be sure to download the right patch. Patch is for English only. Thanks to 3Dfiles
You can download it HERE. Celeron
300-A fix For EAR sound Aaron Lesch (Porting Manager, Extreme Audio Reality, Inc.) sends
word they have a user who has discovered a potential "fix" for the video
stuttering/latency problem EAR has been tracking with the Celeron 300-A processor.
It involves using a freeware utility to change the latency on the CPU. Toni
Schneider Interview I just could not resist two last posts on my way out the door :) Aureal A3D Central reports that there is an interview with Aureal's Toni Schneider talking about I3DL2 over at GA-Source. Team Fortress Classic Preview Firing Squad has posted part 1 of an excellent preview of Team Fortress Classic, the upcoming free multiplayer mod for Half-Life. Hit & Run Just in case you are wondering why I don't respond to any email for the next few days its because I am away, not because I am ignoring you :) If you need an answer right away, please contact Frank or Mikael. I will be back at it Sunday night or Monday morning. Heretic II EP
Aureal Impressions I have been working towards posting something on my first impressions of the EAX and A3D 2 in Heretic II with the EP for and have been comparing notes with Lee from ALive on the EAX for a few days. I finally got around to spending a little time with the A3D 2.0 version and I can offer the following. For EAX I unfortunately must report that the sounds are not very compelling. My play was limited to the training level plus level 1 but I did not notice a change in the reverb from area to area. Even the open areas and underwater seem to have the same settings. With EAX enabled the 3D audio is also not very distinct and the sound is actually somewhat muddy compared to the default sound. I was using a SB Live hook up to Cambridge Soundworks 4Point Surrounds for my quick EAX impressions. ALive received a response from Jake Simpson of Raven on the EAX EP issues in Heretic II from which I have cut only a portion: As for not hearing environments, well, thats got more to do with the way EAX works than anything. When Creative worked with us, they gave us four speaker surround sound, and hooks to call the environment changes. The question then becomes, how do you detect the enviroment ? Underwater is easy, but the rest.. well, Half Life got around it by dropping items in the maps so you can interpolate from one enviroment item to another based on distance from the two. Unfortunately, we didn't have that option, since Creative came into the mix after the game was out. No way where we going to rebuild all the maps for H2 for that. So, in the end, I added an option for maps to setup default enviroments, which actually point to an array of environment options. Then, every frame, I do one of 5 traces, to determine where the roof is, left, right, forward and back. This gives me an idea of if we are outside, inside, in a corridor, or a large room. Dependant on which one, I index into that array of 4 possible options for the environment, and thats your sound type. Not a great solution, but there you are, there wasn't much else I could do without expensive and time consuming world traces. Inside the world spawn code in the code base is a list of the world types you can set up for Heretic II. I ought to post this on the net probably, for aspiring map makers. I have spent a fair bit more time testing the EAX version than I have on the A3D 2.0 version but will offer the following quick observations on A3D 2.0 in the Heretic II EP. The underwater wavetracing effect is fantastic. 3D audio with A3D 2.0 support enabled is sharp throught out the game. Reflections add nicely to the aural environment of Heretic II. However there are some glitches. Sounds once in a while repeat themselves and I also found that the game it self stuttters once in a while in places where I did not notice stutters in default audio. Thats all I will offer for now. Look for much more on the audio and every thing else about Heretic II in our upcoming review of the title. In the mean time I would really like to get your feedback on both the EAX and A3D 2.0 in the Heretic II EP. New A3D Games Thanks to David Gasior of Aureal for the follow list of new titles to support A3D:
I know that titles such as Everquest and Hired Guns will also
support DS3D with EAX. Vortex of Sound Sounds a bit like Locutus of Borg :) but its actually a new web site developed as a resource to Vortex sound card owners. Check out Vortex of Sound. Kingpin Demo Performance Issues I snapped up the following from Gangland, courtesy of Blues News. Not 3D related but sound none the less. If you have managed to burn your modem up with the 100+ MB Kingpin demo only to find game play choppy here is a possible reason as stated by Drew Markham (CEO of Xatrix Entertainment): Also, we managed to track down why the game is running choppy on some systems; its all of the friggin' sounds! If you've got 128 megs of RAM there's no trouble, but on a 64meg system there's some definite hitting. We're working on a pre-caching routine, and we're also going to include native 11k sounds as well as the 22k sounds; if you choose to install with 11k sounds the game should run fine in 64 megs. If this works out well we'll be releasing the new sound files later this week for people having the dreaded "hit" problem. There's more to the post than this sound bit so if you do have the demo headover to Gangland for the whole deal. Bits & Bytes Get ready to line up at eXscape on Friday, March 26, for the chance to be a beta tester for Asheron's Call. Extreme Hardware has posted a review of the Panther XL game controller. A3D Giveaway A3D Giveaway: There's an Aureal Sound Card Contest giving away a half-dozen A3D sound cards that's cop sponsored by The Weapons Factory and Captured.Com. Grabbed this from Blues News. Tuesday, March 23, 99 WHQL
Certified Vortex 1 Drivers Thanks to David Gasior of Aureal for the following. There are sorta new Vortex 1 drivers on our site. These are the same as the previous 1186 drivers except they have been WHQL certified, and will report themselves as such. There is no reason for anyone to download these drivers if they already have the 1186 drivers installed. Well, unless they really want to see that their drivers are certified! :) As per the usual, if you want to get these drivers head on over to Aureal. Everquest Audio David Gasior dropped us a line about audio in Sony's online role playing game, Everquest. To the best of his knowledge, Everquest is currently using the Miles Soundengine, which means support for all the 3D audio APIs. For MIDI, he thinks that they are supporting basic GM, SF2 (Creative SoundFonts) and DLS (DLS Level 1). Starsiege
Review Voodoo Extreme has posted a review of the Dynamix's excellent Starsiege. Here is a snip on the audio. On the sound front Starsiege excels as well. The voice acting is superb, with the talent of Mark Hamill thrown into the mix as an extra. The sound effects are great for the most part, with deep bass stomping sounds from HERCS' feet hit the floor. Laser shots leave a ringing in your ears and the sound of an explosion on an enemy HERC sounds like, well an explosion. The music itself is adrenaline pumping, but never gets in the way of the action. Starsiege also has support for Aureal's A3d sound API, which is icing to an already tasty cake. For more on the audio in Star Siege you can check our interview with lead
programmer Rick Overman. Vortex 2 FAQ
Updated I did a bit of updating of our Unofficial Vortex2 Faq including adding the following Q & A: Q: We know that the S/PDIF port is treated as just a simple output for the front channels during normal usage (not dvd playback). Do you plan to send the 4 speaker channels through the S/PDIF port in AC-3 Dolby Digital 2/2 mode or even 3/2 mode(front/rear) to allow aS/PDIF connection to a Dolby Digtal home theatre setup to use four speakers? David: When you send normal audio out the S/PDIF, it will only send the front stereo signal. There is no way currently to send the signal going to both analog jacks. In order to send front and rear, we'd probably need to encode the streams on the fly into a Dolby standard for your decoder to decode. I seriously doubt that will happen considering the cost of such an endeavor (in terms of engineering time, money to Dolby, and CPU usage to encode). Bits & Bytes Firing Squad has posted a review of the monster sized demo of Kingpin. I was originally going to download my self for a look see but given their current position on 3D sound (which is " We have it on the list, but WAY DOWN on the list...We'll see once a few other things get taken care of.", it fell of my list of priorities. Anyway, the title looks pretty promising aside from that potential ommission so you might want to check out the demo review. Extreme Hardware has posted a review of Skywell's Banshee based Twinpower. Tech-Junkie has posted an interview they did with staff from Gainward, one of the world's biggest OEM manufacturers. Monday, March 22, 99 Aztech PCI 368-DSP Review Planet Hardware has posted a review of the Aztech PCI 368-DSP which uses the VLSI/Qsound Thunderbird 128 chip. Thanks to 3DAI for the pointer. MS Digital Sound System 80 Review I have completed my review of Microsoft's Digital Sound System 80 and was pleasantly surprised at the excellent performance of this sytem, especially as a standard analog system. For all the details including extensive testing of its digital 3D audio capabilitie check out the review. The
Week in Review Once again we have posted our summary of all that happened in the past week of 3D sound.
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