FastEddie Blogs!

Recently, I posted the notice from Creative’s site describing the state of the D3D and OpenAL and how they are being affected by changes made in Vista.

Here’s a more matter of fact response from Creative regarding the changes, and explain more directly how games will be affected, both old and new games.

Creative Labs Responds to Vista Audio Apocalypse

Older games that didn’t use OpenAL are out of luck.  It won’t use EAX, period.

Also, if you’re developing a game, it had better use OpenAL if you want to use anything fancy.  If you’re using a middleware solution, make sure it’s got an OpenAL hook.

Might be of some interest.  Speed comparisons between all of the different browsers out there, across all platforms.  Doesn’t seem like it’s being updated anymore, notably missing Firefox 2 and IE7 final releases.
Browser speed comparisons

A previous link mentioned Valve’s use of multi-core.  Anandtech has done a write-up of the same talk, with a bit more technical details included.  Thanks Paul for the link!

Well worth the read:
Valve Hardware Day 2006 - Multithreaded Edition

Windows Vista releases to manufacturing - Final word from Microsoft.  Let the marketing machine begin.

From our lunchtime discussion today:

Phantasmagoria  - I was wrong, only 7 CDs (!)

M&M Baseball - Apparently it originated from a TV commercial:
“Speaking of nostalgia, does anyone remember M&M baseball?  That commercial where these two Little League kids were eating M&Ms, waiting for their turn up at bat, and this one kid said something to the other like, “When I eat a brown, I get a single, yellow’s a double, orange is a triple.  And when I eat a green, I hit the ball doooown-toooown!” That was cool.”

Here’s an article describing some use of Valve’s multi-core strategy for their engine.  Obviously lacking enough technical depth… but the one interesting tidbit is that the short-term multi-core optimizations will be added in with the release of Episode 2.  That’ll be interesting to see how effecient they are:
Valve Hardware Day: Multi-Core CPUs

Some posts and articles from way back for my reference, so I don’t lose the urls:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/os2-opengl/message/2?source=1  - From 1996, John Carmack discussing the differences between OpenGL and Direct3D.

http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=1&time=20000429013039  - From 2000, Carmack’s plea to the video card hardware industry to support higher than 32-bit textures.

Optimizing Pixomatic:
Part 1 - http://www.ddj.com/184405765
Part 2 - http://www.ddj.com/184405807
Part 3 - http://www.ddj.com/184405848
Written in 2004, Michael Abrash on what he learned while writing Pixomatic (software 3d renderer written from scratch).

Pressure Forces Microsoft to Change Vista Licensing

Well, there you have it… proof that the blog movement and public opinion can change the mind of a behemoth.

Fans of the original should enjoy this sequel of sorts.

Sam & Max: Episode One Demo

Looks awesome!

A lunchtime discussion came up about EAX, and the future of Creative.  Since audio in Vista is moved into user space, what happens to hardware acceleration?  It seems to me that you’d have to interface using some standard Microsoft convention, that may or not include EAX.  Well, after some research, I found this interesting link concerning OpenAL and Vista:

http://www.openal.org/openal_vista.html

Read it.

From the article, we know:

- There are 3 devices used in OpenAL playback:  native, generic hardware, and generic software

- Using the “native” device in OpenAL provides hardware acceleration in both XP and Vista.

- The “native” device doesn’t use DirectSound3D for sound playback, going straight to the driver.

- “Microsoft will be removing DirectSound 3D Hardware support from Direct X with the launch of Windows Vista. DirectSound and DirectSound3D will still function; however, they will no longer use hardware acceleration.”

- The “native” device is unaffected by this change, but the “generic hardware” device will function exactly like the “generic software” device.

- Under Vista:

  -  “new software mixer will give the users basic audio support for their old Direct Sound games but since it has no hardware layer, all EAX effects will be lost, and no individual per-voice processing can be performed using dedicated hardware processing”. 

  - “With the native Windows Vista audio APIs, all this advanced, hardware-based 3D audio processing will be inaccessible”

  - “For gamers this would be the most noticeable loss in Windows Vista”

So, it seems, unless the game is written with OpenAL, you won’t get any benefit from your spiffy hardware sound card.  Apparently, this goes for both old games and new.

I think the message is clear.  If you aren’t using OpenAL for audio, I think it’s time to make the switch.

If you ask me, I think I’d rather just keep my motherboard sound and forget all this mess… but that’s a discussion for another day.