Dark Messiah of Might and Magic w/ 3D spatial sound (OpenAL Soft HRTF audio)
Channel: I Drink Lava - 3D Game Audio
Date: 2018-08-26

Use headphones only with any virtual surround features turned off. Best HRTF effect at 2:35.

This is a demonstration of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic with OpenAL Soft's HRTF through DSOAL. It's a Source engine game, but there's quite a few differences between this game and Valve's Source engine games. The most irritating one being that the game automatically detects your sound configuration, so you actually have to enforce "Quadraphonic" speakers in Windows while having "Headphones" set in your soundcard's control panel. That means if you don't own an external soundcard, you're SOL. Another difference is that the command for this game is "snd_digital_surround 1", not "snd_legacy_surround 1".

Aside from those annoyances, Dark Messiah doesn't sound half-bad with binaural audio. Half-Life 2's HRTF was already kind of flat, but this game sounds even worse. It's still better than the Halo 2 video, but not by much. I think the problem is that the game doesn't take distance attenuation into account, just direction. Because the 3D sound was intended for surround sound setups, there's no vertical HRTF either just like Half-Life 2. Either way, this is just disappointing after how lush Arx Fatalis sounded.

Sorry for the lackluster combat. I had just finished the game on Hard with a warrior build, so I wanted to branch out with a wizard class on Normal for this video. I know the staff sucks hard, but I had to play with it for authenticity.


HRTF grade:
C+

Settings:
Windows Control Panel: Stereo
IRC_1037 HRTF tables placed in %APPDATA%/OpenAL/HRTF
(in alsoft.ini located in %APPDATA%)
channels=stereo
frequency=44100
stereo-mode=headphones
cf_level=0
sample-type=float32
periods=3
period_size=128
default-hrtf=irc_1037_44100
hrtf=true
resampler=linear

Links:
https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/65094
http://repo.or.cz/dsound-openal.git
http://recherche.ircam.fr/equipes/salles/listen/
http://satsun.org/audio/

Credits:
https://images.launchbox-app.com/1ef7d0ac-42a1-493c-9539-571e33d4161c.png
(Use of this logo falls under fair use laws.)



#3dsound #spatialaudio #binaural #3daudio #hrtf #headphones #audiophile #gameaudio #mod
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