Official forums for BZFlag.org

It's really about time this game had surround sound support.

What do you guys think?

Good idea.

Seriously, is there any talk of getting it in an upcoming client? Truly, I can't think of a proposal for enhancing BZFlag better than one for adding surround sound to it...

...except for the usual yada, yada, yada of "Add more special effects, high resolution textures, high-poly models, etc." We've heard such ideas enough times!

ooo

I like it

I my 5.1 arourd my pc could be used for moew than just movies.

doing surround sound in a cross platform system is not easy. I've researched it. The libs that allow it are not open source. On windows it's not bad if you replace all the internal sound stuff with direct sound calls. but on linux and the mac, there are no real system APIs for 3d sound, so you'd have to write stuff for specific hardware.

That's a bummer. I believe that we all would prefer to keep this game multi-platform. Surround sound would be incredible if it were practically possible.

doing surround sound in a cross platform system is not easy. I've researched it. The libs that allow it are not open source. On windows it's not bad if you replace all the internal sound stuff with direct sound calls. but on linux and the mac, there are no real system APIs for 3d sound, so you'd have to write stuff for specific hardware.

OpenAL is a cross-platform, open-source library that supports surround output (see http://www.openal.org/).

Open AL is cross plat, and does have it's own 3d sound engine, but does not ( as of last time I checked ) support surround sound output on non windows systems, it jus does it's own mixing down to 2 speakers, just like bzflag does. If they have added support for that then it is probably a good choice for it, and somone would just have to replace the sound system with it, asuming everyone is ok with it being a new dependency. But I didn't see anything about surround sound, dolby encoding, or anything like that in the docs.

dolby encoding

Unless my understanding is completely wrong, you don't need to use Dolby encoding or anything similar to obtain surround sound with OpenAL.

if it supports 4 speakers and does real positioning, then that's cool. I didn't see anything for that when I skimmed the docs. There was nothing in the init stuff that showed it using 3d sound hardware ( do any of the linux sound APIs use 3d hardware? ). But maybe I missed it.

dolby was just an example. many surrond systems use a dolby encoder on the card and it goes to an external speaker/amp setup. On windows with direct sound, this is all abstracted.

as for just mixing down to 2 speakers, bzflag does that type of 3d sound allready.

I'd be interested to know what sound system is being used on your linux setup, and if it's doing mixing down to 2 speakers or 4. You could have a sound go off behind you and see if it sends the sound out just the rear speakers.

You could have a sound go off behind you and see if it sends the sound out just the rear speakers.

I wouldn't consider my setup to be a true surround-sound one if it didn't!

then it sounds like it would work.

now you just have to find somone to write the code.

Great, it looks like the developers have already thought of it: http://www.bzflag.org/wiki/WorkInProgress

oh that page is way old, it was just ideas that people had ( basicly anyone can edit that page )

As far as I know, noone is working on adding openAL support at this time.

umm where does it say anything about suround sound it says sound...