5.1 channel Audio - Unable to initialize (darkplaces-sdl.exe)

[Xeauron]

SOLUTION (SORT OF):-----------------------------------------------

Card: Creative Sound Blaster Recon3d

Ensure 'Surround' option is enabled on the creative control panel then enable the following in the console (press tilde key in game) and enter:

snd_spatialization_prologic 1

you can adjust the effect with:
snd_spatialization_prologic_frontangle (default 20)

This enables a pseudo (upmixed from 2 speakers) surround which for me is better than nothing! I can hear the monsters from their individual directions and the gun from the center speaker.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------


Hi all,
I'd firstly like to say thanks to everyone for all the info I found here over the last few months. I'm now running Dark Places quake on my GTX 680 (1080 @ 60fps - capped) silky smooth with the hi res texture pack and custom boxes. This game has never looked so good thanks to you guys! (comes close to beating a good few modern games in my opinion & reminds me of the good old days).

The trouble I'm having at the moment is basically I've bought a Sound Blaster Recon 3d Champ sound card and I've got my old 7.1 running as a 5.1 system (works great), however I've been able to run dark places in surround once.

I've no idea what happened but for some reason now the sound system fails to initialize when requesting 5 channels and reverts back to 2.

I've tried darkplaces.exe and darkplaces-sdl.exe, with and without ALchemy (creatives legacy audio converter for old games).

Nothing I'm doing seems to work. Does anyone have any idea how I'd be able to get this going again in surround??

I've tried "snd_channels 5" but I end up with the same error message. Here's the sound portion of the condump:

^7S_Startup: initializing sound output format: 48000Hz, 16 bit, 5 channels...
^7SndSys_Init: using the Win32 module
^7Set primary sound buffer format: no
^7DS:CreateSoundBuffer Failed (-2005401500): channels=5, width=2, speed=48000
^7DirectSound failed to init
^7waveOutOpen failed
^7Wave sound failed to init
^7S_Startup: sound output initialization FAILED
^7S_Startup: initializing sound output format: 48000Hz, 16 bit, 2 channels...
^7SndSys_Init: using the Win32 module
^7Set primary sound buffer format: yes
^7Using secondary sound buffer
^7   2 channel(s)
^7   16 bits/sample
^7   48000 samples/sec
^7DirectSound initialized
^7Sound format: 48000Hz, 2 channels, 16 bits per sample

Using latest build I think...

^7Console initialized.
^7Trying to load library... "zlib1.dll" - loaded.
^7Game is DarkPlaces-Quake using base gamedir id1
^7DarkPlaces-Quake Windows 16:48:22 Aug  5 2012 - release
^7userdir 0 =  (writable)
^7userdir 1 (not applicable)
^7Trying to load library... "shfolder.dll" - loaded.
^7userdir 2 = C:\Users\..\Documents/My Games/darkplaces/ (not writable or does not exist)
^7Trying to load library... "shell32.dll" - loaded.
^7Trying to load library... "ole32.dll" - loaded.

I've attached the full condump to this post as well...



Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

I remember Magnus before he pulled a vanishing act mentioning Surround Sound. Have you checked your Windows section of the audio??? The signal you recieve inheritly is pure Stereo with a few extra riff-raff's to create the surround sound possibility, so try this maybe?

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oMYA1uYXcw]Enable Surround sound on Windows 7 - YouTube[/ame]
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK54j2Exn0w]How to enable 5.1 surround sound. - YouTube[/ame]

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4KYoQKAnoE[/ame]

[Spike]

5.1 is 6 channels.
your drivers might not support 5.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

5.1 is 6 channels.
your drivers might not support 5.

He's already did it once, and doing it once seems enough to reproduce it a second time though. It's been ages since I even had more than two speakers,or even used digital audio :/

I bet money the first time it worked, there wasn't any cvars being forced on the engine.

[Spike]

if in doubt, check the code:
// LordHavoc: disabled this WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE support because it does not seem to be working

o.O

yeah, you can't get more than 2 channels without saying which channels you actually want. Drivers don't like that kind of thing.

Interestingly the error messages are all very win32-specific rather than sdl-specific, so looks like you're using the direct win32 port, rather than the sdl win32 port.
Try the SDL port/exe instead. The SDL library will no doubt do the WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE thing properly.

[Xeauron]

Hi Guys, thanks for the swift replies....wasn't expecting that...lol!

Windows is currently set to 5.1 in the control panel (as seen in the second vid you posted Mindf!3ldzX) and in the sound blaster control panel. I can test each speaker and a sound comes out of them individually when clicked. All other games seem to be working fine but this one...

I started the game last night and the audio was perfect, I could hear the monsters through the corresponding speakers when I turned my head and my gun was coming through the center speaker.

I quit the game to adjust the volume and quit a program running in the background and since then it's saying "failed to open device" for reasons I cannot fathom.

I'll have a play about with the windows control panel again. I have recently uninstalled the Realtek audio drivers and disabled the onboard audio - this was done before I started playing the game again though.

if in doubt, check the code:
// LordHavoc: disabled this WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE support because it does not seem to be working

o.O

yeah, you can't get more than 2 channels without saying which channels you actually want. Drivers don't like that kind of thing.

Interestingly the error messages are all very win32-specific rather than sdl-specific, so looks like you're using the direct win32 port, rather than the sdl win32 port.
Try the SDL port/exe instead. The SDL library will no doubt do the WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE thing properly.

I currently only use the sdl exe because that's the only one which lets me use my logitech rumblepad (yeah I know lol) which I use when playing on the 40" TV from the sofa.

The condump you're looking at is from the SDL executable.

Is there a way to tell it what audio device to use, it may be trying to contact a disconnected device or use an incorrect mode??

I've looked at the cvars and cannot find any related to the above. I've also tried to force primary sound from the shortcut:

"D:\Program Files (x86)\Quake\darkplaces-sdl.exe" -primarysound

[Mindf!3ldzX]

I messaged LordHavoc about your issues, I am pretty sure I've exhausted my idea's. What is killing me is you made no changes. How did you exit Quake?

doing nothing and then quake breaking is horrible,its happened to me before.

[Xeauron]

I messaged LordHavoc about your issues, I am pretty sure I've exhausted my idea's. What is killing me is you made no changes. How did you exit Quake?

doing nothing and then quake breaking is horrible,its happened to me before.

Thanks for taking the time to help and for messaging LordHavok!

I'm not 100% sure but I usually bring the console down and type "quit" as I do with pretty much all games I play. I may have alt tabbed out at some point.

What pisses me off is that for one glorious minute the game sounded amazing, and I remember thinking "oh, I need to close the browser and tweak the volume a little" - did that, sat down to play it and it decided "that's enough surround for you..."

Was getting ready for a good quake session as well..

If only I knew how to tell it what device to use so I can know it's trying the correct one.

There are several other audio devices in my control panel:

*Disabled - Bluetooth audio
*Disabled - Nvidia HD audio (HDMI audio)
*Disabled - Nvidia HD audio (HDMI audio)
*Disabled - Nvidia HD audio (HDMI audio)
*Enabled - SB Recon 3D PCIe (Default)
*Disabled - SPDIf-Out

I've just disabled the Nvidia one in device manager, I'm going to restart and try again as those have now disappeared from my sound panel. Don't think it will make a difference though.

[LordHavoc]

In my experience what works for surround is using the darkplaces-sdl client (not the regular one), and typing:
snd_channels 6

Or snd_channels 8 should also work on some hardware.

Not much I can say beyond that, it worked on my surround setup.

[David_OSU]

I've got the same problem, using the SDL build of Darkplaces with snd_channels set to 8 (or 6), the sound system fails to initialize and drops back to 2 channels. This is with Windows 7, 64-bit, with the HDMI output from my nVidia card routing through a 7.1 receiver. Could it be the nVidia audio driver not exposing more than 2 channels to SDL?

Seems like Windows 7 has really made multichannel game audio setup difficult. I've been able to get OpenAL to use 7.1 audio, using an OpenAL wrapper as a workaround for the crappy support of DirectSound in Win7. This is the only way I can get surround to work in Doom 3, for example. I wish the Win32 build of Darkplaces could use OpenAL.

[DeadTenor]

I am wondering if it has something to do with this as well because I have the exact same problem-- I also have an Nvidia HDMI output in my audio control panel-- however it is disabled. Surround sound will not work for me, even with the SDL version of Darkplaces. I am using a Sirus 5.1 Surround Sound Headphone with a built in DAC.

[MadGypsy]

This may be the dumbest thing I ever said or it could potentially be a fix.

I quit the game to adjust the volume and quit a program running in the background and since then it's saying "failed to open device" for reasons I cannot fathom.

What program were you running in the background and did you try to absolutely recreate your success by opening that again while playing Quake? I know that what I am implying is retarded, but windows is retarded. Maybe, just friggin maybe that program you had running in the background was somehow allowing you to get full 5:1 through some mysterious glitch.

Worse case scenario - I'm wrong and you waste 2 seconds attempting to recreate your success.

edit: keep in mind that EVERYTHING needs to be exactly how you had it. If you disabled drivers that werent disabled when it was working, you need to go re-enable them too.

[Xeauron]

Well I did managed to fix the problem I had by ticking surround in the creative control panel, what's weird is that this option doesn't enable multichannel - it simply up mixes 2 channel audio over all speakers.

It enabled true multi directional audio in game somehow.

However

Now I've come back to the game after a couple of months and it's completely broken, I only get 2 channel audio no matter what I do and it's really pissing me off! It's like I missing a component of the game...

MadGypsy - I'd tried everything mate and did manage to fix it. I just can't get it working now. I've tried multiple versions of darkplaces and it just complains that directsound failed to initialize because of an invalid parameter.

David_OSU - Any chance you could explain how you got it working, I'm using win7 64bit also. I'm searching OpenAL wrapper but I'm not having much luck...

EDIT:---------------------------------

Thanks LordHavok for your input but yeah, I've tried every combination of channels I can and nothing seems to make any difference. Just fails to initialize any more than 2 channels then falls back to 2 channel.

AAaaarrrggghh!!

2nd EDIT:----------------------------- SOLUTION

Found the solution to how I was getting surround before (or what I thought was surround), I've updated my first post in this thread with the details.

Thanks everyone...

[DeadTenor]

Xeauron
Thank you so much for sharing this workaround! I now can hear the game with positional audio! You rock!

[David_OSU]

David_OSU - Any chance you could explain how you got it working, I'm using win7 64bit also. I'm searching OpenAL wrapper but I'm not having much luck...
...

My workaround only works for games that support OpenAL, not Darkplaces. Anyway, the OpenAL driver I used is AeonWave (www.adalin.com).

I'm going to try the snd_spatialization_prologic cvar, it should at least give me pseudo-surround using the Dolby Pro Logic IIx decoder in my 7.1 receiver.