Author: Infernal <[email protected]>     Reply to Message
Date: 7/29/2004 11:12:29 AM
Subject: reasons for poor sound.

I'll give you some reasons as to why sound has taken a backburner in gamedev.

First, games were made for low memory systems. Even consoles like the ps1 ,supernes and n64 had piddly amounts of ram. we are talking like 16-32mb max. Now as these games were made for these machine, the focus was on the render quality. This means better quality textures and more of them. This left little memory left for sound data in the limited ram. This is why sounds were always downsampled pieces of crap and music was shitty midi in the beginning. As this trend was set, dev's did improve sound with the bigger mem footprint allowed on pc's and newer console, but they still focus on the visual aspects of the game because unless you are an audiophile, your not going to hear that big of a difference between lowerbitrate approximations and the true cd qualtiy sound. On the other hand, you'd have to be blind to NOT notice the differences in the visual quality of a game. A game can sound unbelievable, but if it looks like crap, it won't be so attractive to gamers. I know this borders on another argument of whether a crappy looking game can sell well because of the quality of the gameplay, but I am talking about a difference as simple as 16bit to 32bit graphics.

From a programming/player standpoint, adding better sound to a game isn't so easy, openAl while being good, like you said, is incomplete and requires a whole understanding of how to place sounds to use it. In directX, there may be mixing options I've never seen, but from what I have seen, playing a sound is as simple as loading it with the DX objects and calling the play member function. This doesn't lend well to having DSP mixers and other such fancy contraptions in the game.

Beyond all of this, I would rather they remove the fucking 3d sound library usage until they actually work. I've had so many games lose sound in the cutscenes or during the game and that really annoys me as both a player and a programmer. ruins the game experience, and removes my compassion for the coders of the game.
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