The week in review: May 10-16

Last week's features at 3DsoundSurge

• We didn't finish anything last week. We were busy working on some reviews as well as a game guide and a huge sound FAQ over last week.

Last week's sound news

Drivers

• The much awaited Live!Ware 2.0 has been released by Creative Labs. The drivers have received mostly good reviews so far. The most significant additions are significant improvement of the 3D sound, especially with headphones which now is roughly on par with Aureal's headphones implementation according to the few people that so far tested both. My own first impressions are that Aureal's 3D sound with headphones are still slightly better but with 4 speakers the Live now has the edge. The reverb and software have also been improved and support for EAX 2 is included. Something else that works now is AC-3 pass-thru and it should work with at least Cinemaster software dvd player (according to Anton Shabelski) but I would guess several other software DVD players may support this feature too. What Creative calls AC-3 bypass, that is pass on the AC-3 signal from the Dxr2 in the live and then pass it on to an external AC-3 decoder won't work with the digital daughter card that come with the Live. For that you need to order the new $54 digital daughter card from Creative's site (not tried this myself).  For more details on Live!Ware head over to Creative's official Live!Ware Page and ALive's quick review. We will do a complete review next week.

  There are of course several people that have problems with the new drivers but most of the problems have only happened to a few users so it's uncertain if it's bugs, user errors or some rare configurations.   Creative already updated the owners FAQ with the most common problems. Overall the drivers seems to be of good quality so far. The only major problem I've seen is that the performance in the Half-Life benchmark are significantly lower (from 37 fps to 26). I've no good explanation for this and there may be some configuration error I made but performance without 3D sound are still the same as before and the MX300 score are also the same so it only applies to the Live when EAX is enabled. The scores in WinBench 99 have also improved so it's not the basic 3D positioning that reduced performance.

  A few minor issues (IMO) is that the AutoEA (used with games and other apps that you want to use EA presets for) doesn't reset to defaults after you quit the application and that the registry files increase with several MB when you install it. This can cause a crash in NT4 so you better  increase it before you install the drivers (for details see the ownersfaq mentioned above). The easiest fix for the AutoEA issue is to create some batch program that runs for a split second and choose the default reverb setting for it. If you don't want or can't make such a program just assign it to some other program that's easy to start and close like the calculator and place a link on the desktop. If anyone got a better idea please mail me.

  Even though the drivers seem to be of good quality the same can not be said about how Creative handled this driver update. This release was probably one of if not the worst ever on the web. Creative had no mirrors and wasn't even close to being able to handle the load. Many people couldn't even access the page from where you choose the server to use for downloads! On top of that it seems like several of the servers sent corrupted files because they were not configured correctly. There must have been a lot more people that downloaded Quake3 but id handled the volume much better than Creative. It's a shame when a / billion company with 4500 employees can't manage to handle the same amount of downloads that a less than 50 employee company can just because they refuse to let people mirror the files. Creative's server still seems to be slow when I write this.

  You can get the 28 MB driver update from  Creative's official download page where you also can get a limited demo of the new occlusions feature that future EAX 2 games will support. For some unofficial mirrors and direct links to Creative's server and a tips for those that got corrupted files you can go to our http://www.3dsoundsurge.com/liveware.html page. Creative asked people to remove mirrors so several or all of the mirrors listed may be down when you read this but hopefully Creative's server will be able to handle the load by then.

  Live!Ware 2.0 can also be ordered immediately on a CD for US.95 (excluding shipping and handling) from Creative's customer service at 1-800-998-1000 or at 1-800-998-5227. According to those that called the number the CD won't be shipped for at least 4 weeks. No word yet on when Europe or Asia will get the CD. The CD will contain a few more features than the download version.  The Get Live!Ware 2.0 Page give the details about the difference between the CD version and the downloadable one.

New games, demo and patches

• Alien's vs Predator has now gone gold. The game supports DS3D with EAX.
• 2.01 patch for X-Wing Alliance has been released and among other things adds support for A3D and improves the Direct Sound 3D support. According to some posts in the newsgroup this game still sucks when it comes to 3D sound. The sound is better if you disable 3D sound. If anyone have a different experience please let me know.
• Warzone 2.02 and 2.03 patches were released last week. Two New Maps and a DirectPlay tweak is included in the new patches that can you can get from http://www.pumpkin.co.uk/iex/Downloads.html or 3dfiles
  

Reviews of soundcards and speakers

• PCChips M750i review done by CPU Review. It's a motherboard with an onboard 3D PCI Sound Pro (CM8338), supports 4 speakers and has a SPDIF in/out. The 3D audio technology is licensed from Central Research Lab (CRL), U.K. who we know better as Sensaura.
• Aureal's Vortex2 SuperQuad Digital PCI Sound Card review posted by 3DHardare.Net. This is the OEM soundcard that Aureal is selling to system integrators.
• Videologic's Vortex 2 offering have been evaluated by the Stratics Network.
• Maxi Studio ISIS, which uses ESS' Maestro 2EM chip and Sensaura's 3D technology was reviewed at 3D Audio Immersion.
• Cambridge Soundworks FPS2000 Digital Speaker System was reviewed by GA-Source.
• Boston Acoustics' Micromedia 3-piece speaker system found its way to 3Dhardware.net which thought the "the system at around 150 bucks is not a steal, but is worth the money if you like good audio"
• Benwin's BW2000 flat panel speaker set was also reviewed by 3Dhardware.net . Mark will soon review this set and even though he shares a lot of the opinions with the reviewer from 3Dhardware.net he come to different conclusions. Don't buy this set until you read our review.
• Labtec’s LCS-2414 3-Piece Multimedia Speakers ended up on AnandTech review board.

Other sound news

• Microsoft has posted a white paper by Chanel Summers, who is an Audio Technical Evangelist for Microsoft titled A Dozen Myths about DirectMusic. The objective of this white paper is to outline the most common misconceptions about DirectMusic and present the facts about its capabilities and design goals. Monolith also announced last week that  they will support DirectMusic in their LithTech engine and I know Epic has the same plan for their Unreal engine but they won't use DirectMusic in Unreal Tournament.
• Aureal announced that Might and Magic VII For Blood and Honor supports A3D. No word on whether that's 1.x or 2.0. The game will also support EAX. According to a story on GameSpot Aureal will soon release a list of upcoming A3D games but Gamespot managed to already find out that the following games will support A3D
  • Episode I: Pod Racer by LucasArts
  • Episode I: The Phantom Menace by LucasArts
  • Drakan: Order of the Flame by Psygnosis
  • Soldier of Fortune by Raven Software
  • Battlezone 2 by Pandemic Studios
  • Dark Reign 2 by Pandemic Studios

  GameSpot News has also learned that Aureal has plans to port over their A3D 2.0 API over to other operating systems including Linux, MacOS, BeOS and NT 4.0. Additionally, Aureal possesses the ability to integrate A3D 2.0 onto PlayStation titles as well, although the company assures doing so is possible, and not probable.

• Voyetra Turtle Beach Inc. unveiled two sound cards built around Aureal's Vortex 2.
  The gamer oriented Montego II Quadzilla places the Vortex 2 chipset on a Turtle Beach custom-designed board. Features include a standard SPDIF RCA digital output jack for direct-to-digital recording or data transfer. The board will retail for $99
  Again built around the Vortex 2, the music/audio hobbyists and professionals oriented Montego II Home Studio(TM) is a PC-based desktop production system. One of the upgrades is an enhanced MIDI engine that includes a 64-voice Roland(TM)GS-compliant sample set. The system also includes both RCA and optical SPDIF inputs and outputs for lossless digital audio data transfer to/from DAT machines, minidisc recorders, home theater components, digital mixers, and other digital gear. Twin stereo outputs allow for dual monitoring, or the addition of headphones. This board will retail for $299 

• QSound Labs announced that AIWA CSD (Computer Systems Division) is featuring its QSound technology in their new line of USB (Universal Serial Bus) speakers. You can read more about QSound 3D technology in our recent article.

• Full On 3D posted a 3D Audio Article which probably is the most complete article posted so far. It  was written before Liveware 2.0 was released as the Sound Blaster Live! now supports 4 speaker HRTFs and 3D audio elevation so that part of the article of the article isn't correct anymore. There is also mention of support for wall occlusions and acoustic materials in the A3D 1.x API. I want to expand on this a little. This support was quite different from the occlusion and materials support in the A3D 2.0 API. The A3D 1.x API enabled developers to create occlusion and similar effects in the sense of using volume attenuation and alpha filtering to creating the muffling sound of sounds occluding using the HFAbsorbFactor() call. As noted in the article, this feature was one of the three key differences between A3D 1.x and DS3D (the others being a voice manager (Aureal's name for their resource manager) and a more advanced distance model where they have a high frequency distance factor that the developer can manipulate to simulate different atmospheric environments, such as thick fog or underwater).
  
  What the HFAbsorbFactor() call did was give the programmer a way to create the effect, but make him code the occlusion detection scheme himself. According to Aureal's David Gasior, LucasArts put this to good use by creating an occlusion engine in the game "Jedi Knight". Where it differs significantly from the A3D 2.0 API is with A3D 2.0, occlusions are now automated via the geometry engine.

• Ear on Games has posted a review of Gigadeth Production's "Quantum Rage: Songs for Deathmatch" frag-fest soundtrack.
• Ear on Games has posted their review of the audio in Shogo: Mobile Armour Division.  If you have not already done so you can also check out our full review of Shogo.
• Ear on Games has posted a Q&A with Chris Sweetman, who is the resident sound designer at Gremlin Interactive. Chris is currently working on working on Rebel Act Studio's upcoming 3rd person action/adventure fantasy "Blade".

• System Shock 2 will soon be finished.  We are still awaiting details on the audio in System Shock 2 but given that it will be using a modified version of the engine used for Thief: The Dark Project, which features DS3D with EAX, A3D 1.x and innovative software audio manipulation, we are hoping for more big things. For some early impressions on the music you can go to Avault where they  posted 3 MP3s featuring music from the game.

For more news from last week check out our news archive.

Upcoming features at 3DsoundSurge

Reviews that we are currently working on

• Trident's 4DWave-DX chips: We are still waiting for Trident to clarify a few things about the card.
• Expendable
• Creative's Desktop Theater 5.1: This week
• Aztech's 368DSP soundcard: This or next week
• Videologic's Sirocco speaker system: This week
• Videologic's Vortex2 soundcard
• Benwin BW2000: This or next week
• Yamaha192 Digital: Next week
• Blood2
• Sin
• FPS 2000
• Xitel's Vortex2 card
• Xitel's force feedback headphones
• QSound's UltraQ device
• Tribes
• Starsiege
• Thief
• Heretic II

Other features we are working on:

• An improved gamelist that will replace our soundwaves.
• An brief overview how the A3D2 SDK works
• An article about EAX 2, 3 and the new I3DL2 will probably be available mid May.

As always if you have any ideas for products we should review or features we should do, please let us know.

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