rapture3d advanced, openal, auto-updater

[TwoToes]

i'd like to be able to use my copy of rapture3d advanced with TM2, problem is the auto updater.

in order to get R3D recognised by TM2's setup console i have to disable the openal.dll file in TM2's game dir.
doing so enables me to select R3D as the audio device, and the game loads it.
however the auto updater then recognises the missing openal.dll file, downloads a replacement, and restarts TM2.

is there any way of avoiding this?

[LordJuanlo]

I would like to use Rapture3D too. Is there any way to specify an OpenAL driver in this game? I have 2 OpenAL devices on my computer: Asus Xonar D2 and Rapture3D. There are games that list all OpenAL drivers (Lord of the Rings Online and Stalker) and allow you to choose one of them, it would be great for this game.

http://www.blueripplesound.com

[xbx]

Hi!

For the sake of robustness and reproducibility I included a specific software implementation of openal.
But you can overwrite the dll with an other, such as the "router" openal32.dll (which allows to choose system installed dll)

However, there's a trick: the updater will get in the way, and will overwrite the modified dll by the dll from update. To work around this, you just need to have a dll more recent than one from the updater, and it won't overwrite it.
So you just need to "touch" the dll to make it more recent, and all should work.


Sorry about the inconvenience, but it was just too clumsy and impractical to not be able to know which version of the dll in use, and to sort out bug reports...

You should also know that the game tries to use a few openal-soft specific extensions: most importantly the "ALC_SOFTX_loopback_device" which is used to record audio when shooting a video. (it will just fallback to the legacy recording if not present)


To sum it up, if you want to fiddle around:
just download http://files.maniaplanet.com/tools/OpenAL32_router.zip
and unzip it over the game installation to overwrite openal32.dll, and it should allow you to choose the driver of your choice.
(but no promises, it's untested!)

tell me if it works!

[TwoToes]

unfortunately no joy - r3d loads, but no audio. logs display this error:

2011-10-17 18:50:20.00 Rapture3D: Game ALC call failed: The device already has a context in alcCreateContext()

i'm guessing this is the specific extension you mentioned?

thanks for the help though!

p.s out of curiosity: i'm gonna be picking up a XFi HD soon - does this mean that even with that card everything will still processed in software?

[xbx]

unfortunately no joy - r3d loads, but no audio. logs display this error:

2011-10-17 18:50:20.00 Rapture3D: Game ALC call failed: The device already has a context in alcCreateContext()

i'm guessing this is the specific extension you mentioned?

humm I don't think so.
I'll have to try with rapture my self to see what's going on.

p.s out of curiosity: i'm gonna be picking up a XFi HD soon - does this mean that even with that card everything will still processed in software?

yes.
but the hack with overwriting the openal32.dll may work in this case.
(It should work but I didn't test recently)

[TwoToes]

One of the Blue Ripple guys had this to say:

Sounds like the game is calling alcCreateContext() twice for some reason. It might be because you have masquerading enabled(?) – o/w I don’t know…

i don't have masquerading enabled, so it's not that.

also: enable hrtf...? have you developed your own set or is this option for dedicated sound cards?

TM2 sounds awesome by the way.

[LordJuanlo]

First things first. Xbx, thank you very much for trying to help us. With this new DLL we can choose the OpenAL device from game configuration and I can see Rapture3D there. But as TwoToes said, it doesn't work, I get no sound at all. If it helps, I have emailed Richard Furse from Blue Ripple Sound several times. He's a fantastic and really helpful guy who does his best to fix problems, I reported him several issues with some games (Stalker and Killing Floor I think) and he fixed them with Rapture3D updates. You could ask him for help, it could be something that can be easily fixed from Blue Ripple sound or from Nadeo.

Thank you again, I really appreciate when developers actually read user feedback and try to help, even with minoritary concerns like this one. It's something that I see very rarely in forums where developers interact with their customers.

[xbx]

I reproduced the pb, and I have a simple fix, which I'll include in next update (don't ask when... I don't know )

[LordJuanlo]

Thank you so much! Can't wait!

[TwoToes]