HL2 Sound

[Magicpants]

Anyone know anything about it? I'm assuming EAX3 is the best it'll support. (OPENAL???)
Would be nice to get a game that can support EAX3 without a massive FPS / processing time hit....Also do we know anything about the music? Is it being done in-house or have they gone for an external source (NIN ala Quake :E ).

Thats the end of my noob questions...

(Apologies if this has already been covered, i did search the forums...)

 

[Direwolf]

We don't know too much about the sound, other than its good.
I believe it is being done by the same people as HL1, and that EAX is indeed supported.
Correct?

 

[Goombatommy]

Proll DD5.1, EAX, A3D, etc. The usual.

 

[Magicpants]

Lol quick replies
I'd assume A3D was not officially supported tho as Aureal kinda don't exist???

Afaik EAX3 is still the best thing around, i'm expecting it to be all OPENAL like most of the recent games.

Of course everyone knows that in the original HL A3D was far superior to the EAX included (was it A3D 2.0 and EAX 1.0??) :cheese:

 

[Xtasy0]

music is done by the same guy that did HL's music.
i dunno about what api's will be used though.

 

[Magicpants]

yeh API was the acronym i was after :dork:

 

[Agent4054]

You know, there is a seperate forum for this kind of thing. In fact, this was already discussed: http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5702

I was fumbling around valve's site today and found in their Source Mod FAQ some stuff about their sound system:

"What is the sound system like?

Sounds are all driven by a script file, and sounds are played by label, not by .WAV filename, so once you add the hooks into the game code to play the sound, exactly which WAV gets played, over what channel, and with what probability is all controlled by the script. This is great because the sound guy can iterate on sounds without the help of a programmer. We also Doppler-shifted bullet sounds, which is just cool!

Half-Life 2 supports 5.1, 4.1, and 2 speaker systems. Half-Life 2 supports wave files with 8/16bit, mono/stereo, optional ADPCM compression, and arbitrary sampling rates up to 44.1KHz, and MP3 files as well. We support our own DSP in software. We're working with creative on supporting EAX for that as well.

The sound engine also includes functions for directionality and environmental falloff (atmospheric dB attenuation, etc.). Everything's modeling at real dB levels and all blended together. There's also a whole set of tools for adding dramatic soundscapes and multiple layers of audio - background, action, talking, etc. - that gets blended together cinematically

There's also very fancy stuff like Bullet sounds that are modeled and spatialized as continuous sub-sonic 120db sound sources moving through space."

 

[Magicpants]

apologies... i did look obviously not hard enough. I beg forgiveness

 

[Magicpants]

although... that thread sucked. There was hardly any useful information. I want more!

 

[Agent4054]

Oh, sorry if i sounded pissed off. lol just a friendly reminder.

 

[Agent4054]

Did you see the info I quoted? But thats all the info we know.

And yes, Valve does have its own in-house audio team.

 

[Magicpants]

Thanks very much.
I'm sure it clears a few things up for me and others who were interested.

:dozey:

 

[Gorgon]

I know THX.

but
What is EAX?

 

[Goombatommy]

EAX = Enviromental Enhanced Audio .....X is an abbreviation for Audio for some reason or another.

 

[Gorgon]

Ok, but what does it do?

thanks

 

[Agent4054]

adds environmental effects to the game. reverb, occlusion, distortion, etc. depending on room dynamics and whatever the devs want the area to sound like.