DIrectSound on top of openAL ?

[Chris Robinson]

On Thursday 30 October 2008 06:05:20 am Roderick Colenbrander wrote:
> Personally I think that even if OpenAL added the functionality we need that
> the user experience for most users still won't be good. Most users want to
> play lets say mp3's while they are gaming. This means that in order to work
> properly OpenAL under the hood again needs to use alsa+dmix or even worse
> pulseaudio. For that reason I'm not sure if going directly to OpenAL
> instead of going through wineoss/winealsa is any better.

winealsa/wineoss would have to do the same, really. With a proper DLL thunk, 
Win32 OpenAL apps can call directy to host OpenAL, which does have some 
improvements (namely talking to ALSA/OSS directly, up to 7.1 surround sound 
output (Creative's only does stereo for software mixing), using host 
configuration, etc).

DSound on top of OpenAL is a nice idea, IMO, it's just OpenAL's current 
short-comings prevent it from happening well enough.