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                      <p><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000FF"><i><a href="../../2.1/uc/index.html"><font color="#904C10" size="3">Sounds 
                        From All Over</font></a></i></font></b><br>

                      
                      <div align="right"> <font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-1">By 
                        <a href="mailto:jsimpson@ravensoft.com">Jake Simpson</a></font></div>
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                  <td width="45%" align="right" valign="top"> 
                    <h5 align="right"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#00025E">Vol. 
                      2, Issue 4&nbsp; <br>
                      November 29, 1999&nbsp; </font></b></h5>
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              <loonystart> 
              <p align="right">&nbsp;</p>
              
            <p align="left"> <font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The A3D 
              protocol is much more geared directly to the card than the EAX approach. 
              It's almost direct to the metal kind of stuff, which means it's 
              tougher to pick up initially, but you do get a better feel for what's 
              going on, and the controls you have over it.</font></p>
            <p></p>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The Miles sound system 
              is a bit of a misnomer. Its more a layer of API that sits on top 
              of whatever kind of card you have already. The idea being that it 
              can support A3D, EAX, DirectSound, you name it. You just say, &quot;I 
              want this sound at this location, with 3D sound, this kind of environment, 
              this kind of echo, off you go&quot; and the system does it. It does 
              all the initialization it needs to, figures out what kind of sound 
              card you have, and basically does everything for you, plus more. 
              There's .mp3 decompression built in, as well as other very sexy 
              stuff. Its very handy, and pretty cheap considering the amount it 
              does for you as a programmer. The downside is that it's fairly expensive 
              CPU wise. Not terribly, but there is a cost. I understand that <b>Daikatana</b> 
              uses Miles to good effect though.</font></p>
            <p></p>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Regarding obstruction 
              and occlusion, it's important to actually distinguish between the 
              two. Obstruction is where you can hear a sound, but there is something 
              in the way, like a pillar. You can hear the sound reflected off 
              walls or other objects, but not directly. Occlusion is where the 
              sound has a wall between you and it. Thus it would either be muffled, 
              or not heard at all dependant on the composition of the wall and 
              your proximity to it. </font></p>
            <p></p>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">These are two different 
              problems to solve algorithmically. For the second problem, you need 
              access to some world geometry to know where the walls are. In order 
              to figure out if a wall is between you and the sound, you need to 
              do some kind of trace function from you to the sound source, looking 
              to see what's in the way. These traces are not free, and can be 
              expensive if you are traveling the length of the map. They need 
              to be done every frame, to update the volume for the sound, which 
              means a fair bit of processing per frame. This is where you start 
              getting CPU time being spent, and where people start getting worried 
              about sound CPU demands. It's interesting to realize that this is 
              all done in software, before the sound card gets involved at all. 
              While both Aureal and Creative mention that A3D 2.0 and EAX 2.0 
              have obstruction and occlusion built in, they mean that they will 
              write the code for your game that does the obstruction and occlusion, 
              not that its handled in hardware. There's really nothing to stop 
              you doing this yourself in your own engine, with just a basic DirectX 
              sound system. </font></p>
            <p></p>
            <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Something else worth 
              mentioning regarding occlusion is that most games out there don't 
              have it right now. If you support a system that has it, as well 
              as a system that doesn't, then you can get yourself into a bit of 
              a mess. To clarify, with Heretic II we had the basic Quake II sound 
              system, which was just that. Basic. Then we added A3D 2.0 (with 
              occlusion and obstruction) support into the patch. Now the system 
              automatically selected which to use, depending on what card you 
              had. The drawback here is that if you were playing deathmatch using 
              the default sound system, as long as you had proximity to other 
              players, you could hear their footsteps, no matter if there was 
              a wall in the way. With A3D 2.0, due to occlusion, you couldn't. 
              Those playing default sound had aural clues as to your whereabouts 
              that you didn't have for them. You could always switch to default 
              sound, but that would have rather defeated the point of having A3D 
              in the first place. Of course the solution would have been to put 
              in the occlusion for all the sound systems, but hindsight is always 
              20/20 isn't it? </font></p>
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<p><i><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2">Credits: Illustration 
  &copy; 1999 Dhabih Eng. This article is &copy; 1999 Jake Simpson. All other 
  content is &copy; 1999 loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited. 
  So don't do it, or we'll make your ears bleed.</font></i></p>
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