Where are we going?

Simon (UK ass kicker) King

Yes, after a little quite period, Simon is dragging his soapbox out again and coming on in full voice. What’s prompted this is me having a little shufti over the new Environmental Audio site from Creative.

Now I’m sure that some of  you people are as sick I am of the old Creative/Aureal battle.  Each camp has it’s staunch supporters. And as you might understand, it’s very difficult to remain impartial. I distinctly remember coming back from the SB Live! launch totally hyper about this new soundcard.

There have been countless "web shoot out’s" between EAX and A3D 2, and so far it would seem that on the small number of A3D 2 games we’ve seen, people think that it has the edge. Half-Life is a common benchmark, and I play it a good deal myself – it brings my no-cache Celeron 300 to it’s knees at crucial moments. And I die. Repeatedly.

In Half-Life, there’s no doubt that my MX300 gives a more detailed environmental experience – the occlusions really do it for me on this one – the muffled voices of the scientists as they get clubbed to death. And the transition between one environment and another is nice and smooth. EAX ‘pops’. And the odd environment gets stuck. But the reverb on the SB Live! in the air conditioning ducts is nothing short of pant-browning.

Many people who are better gamers than I (and have more time on their hands, I would suspect) have played Half-Life’s later levels, and decry that the outdoor EAX implementation is lousy – far too much reverb. But this is the fault of the programmers, surely? With all the change that is going on at the moment, is the support for these whizzo new standards not getting the time it deserves?

What I’m getting at is this. Creative release EAX/SB Live!.   A few games appear. Aureal release A3D2/Vortex2.  A few games appear.   Creative say "Aha! Because we are so great, we shall reprogram the 10K1 and introduce a new API". And probably a few more games come out.  And on top of this, EAX 3 is on it’s way, which if you read between the lines on the new EAudio website, will include some degree of ‘audio wave-tracing’. And no doubt now Aureal has something in the works. I’d put money on it being something along the lines of "Aha! Because we are so great, we shall twiddle with the Vortex 2, and introduce {something}". And so it goes on.

And here is my point {finally}. I really do hope the IASIG get their collective backsides in gear and release their audio I3DL2 API that has some kind of environmental modelling, and get games programmers to just write to that. Then the competition can be over which manufacturer provides better support for the one API.

Competition is a good thing. It generally means that the consumer gets the best deal. But the kind of evil number-catching-up-ours-is-better-than-yours game that Aureal and Creative are playing with each other at the moment, with new API’s (yes, I know EAX 2 is primarily for end users, but it’s confusing) and lawsuits and what have you flying around, your average PC dude, who trusts what he reads in a magazine, is going to get just a teensy bit confused. And here you have the FUD factor (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) factor that makes most people say "Oh, I’ll leave it for six months, see how things develop". And this, more than anything else, is what  can cost both of the two big guns sales.

Simon (UK ass Kicker) King

As always... Questions, Comments, Flames are appreciated.

Editorial 8
April 17, 99

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