rfxcasey

As information about most of the specific issues I have encountered while using the Sound Blaster !live 5.1 platinum under Windows XP has been basically non-existant I'll continue documenting my experiences for others.

I had an issue with missing sounds in certain games while using the KX project drivers. The reason I switched from the WMD driver in the first place was because of what I believe to be a problem between DirectX 9.0c, the WDM drivers and the sound engine of certain games. While using various versions of the official Sound Blaster !live drivers I had mild success in solving some of the issues mainly horribly distorted loud pulsing static which would spontaneously start up in the middle of playing certain games (Silent Hunter 3, 4, Prince of persia: Warrior Within and Pro Race driver to name a couple.) Alot of Ubisoft products seem to suffer from this. I don't know what Ubisoft does consistantly different from most other game developers. Now that I think about it, I had a problem with Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow which is also another Ubisoft product. Adopting the KX driver solved these issues but caused others namely missing sounds in several programs. At first I thought this was related to OpenAL sound rendering, and while I still believe there is an issue with the KX drivers and OpenAL implimentation I have found that the specific issue I'm covering is unrelated to the use of OpenAL at least with Silent Hunter 4 although I am not sure if it uses Openal or not. Unreal 3 and UFO: Afterlight are another issue, both of which use OpenAL and have related missing sound rendering problems which can be overcome by using software sound rendering although I only consider this a temporary fix and is not really what I would consider an exceptable solution in my opinion. If there is no hit to performance or sound quality using software rendering I can live with it but I have not seen any data to indicate one way or the other so I would just assume there are more benefits to using harware acceleration. Once again using a 2 speaker setup I don't know if there is really any advantage to using acceleration. In a 4 output channel surround setup hardware rendering may be more efficient but I would think in a 2 speaker setup disabling all 3d hardware and software surround sound features would actually be better.

Ok prime example is Silent Hunter 4 which I have had nothing but sound problems with since installing it. There seemed to be sounds that start loud, then disappear, then come back but are very low in volume. Silent Hunter 4 like many other games has limited sound options where the engine is concerned and directly editing any configuration file with a sound engine entry has basically no effect more effect then using the sound menu options on this issue. While I like the KX project drivers the menus and configurations for the driver itself leave something to be desired. Now let me jump tracks for a second. With the KX drivers installed under the Windows control panel I had set the speaker options to Desktop speakers as I only use 2 speakers and a subwoofer that all plug into the jack for the front audio channel. This didn't solve my problem. I then went into the KX project speakers setup and set it for 2.1 speaker setting but I was still missing audio that seemed to be related to the players spacial relationship to the sound in the game. So basically control panel set for 2 speaker and KX set for 2 speaker but still the same problem. It seemed like the card was still in 4 channel mode (front,rear,center and subwoofer). Please note that under the KX speaker setup after setting the output to 2.1 you must also check use the surround sound option or your card will still be in multiple output channel surround mode. Running the KX sound test without the use surround option checked did not mix the center and rear channels to the left and right outputs. So if you are in a game and are positioned either directly in front of or behind and sound source you will not here it unless you have center and rear speakers hooked up to the respective output channels. Checking the use surround option and then running the sound test yielded both the center and rear channel sounds being mixed to the left and right channels for proper 2 speaker functionality during the sound test. One strange thing however is that in Silent Hunter 4 while the sound source directly in front of me was loud and clear now it was still missing the rear audio mixing into the left and right channels. I'll look into that more when I get home tonight.