OpenAL

OpenAL ( Open Audio Library) is a platform- independent programming interface for generating three-dimensional sound effects and surround sound, which was created mainly for the computer game development, but is also used in a wide variety of audio applications. With OpenAL sound effects can be how to create and mount surround sound and Doppler effect, and hardware acceleration is supported. The implementation of OpenAL subject in much of the free and open source GNU Lesser General Public License and is currently in version 2.1 before.

Technical details

The OpenAL Programming Interface ( API) can and should be seen as complementary to the graphics APIs OpenGL and OpenCL, so care was taken in the development particularly on the approximation of the structure, programming style and naming conventions. Through the combined use of two libraries, a high portability is guaranteed. As with OpenGL, OpenAL implementations for a variety of platforms and programming languages ​​, most are written in the C programming language.

OpenAL is a direct competitor to Microsoft's DirectSound - a part of DirectX - to look at. Thanks to the good portability OpenAL has today become widespread, there are numerous programs and games that use OpenAL. The operating system Mac OS X from Apple used for audio playback by default OpenAL interface.

History

The original idea for OpenAL was born in 1998 at Loki Software. Loki software employed at that time mainly with porting Windows games to Linux, because the idea made ​​sense to develop an audio API corresponding to the graphics API OpenGL. Since the first experiments have achieved only little one came in 1999 with Creative Labs this week to jointly develop a standardized, platform- independent audio API. From this collaboration in 2000, the OpenAL 1.0 specification was created.

The first libraries were published in the same year for Linux, Windows, Mac OS 8 /9 and BeOS, a year later published Creative Labs the first library with support for hardware acceleration of the Sound Blaster Live. However, this only worked on Mac OS 8 /9 and Windows. Since that is continually worked on the OpenAL library, support for additional platforms and audio hardware has been added.

The future development of the OpenAL project should proceed similarly as in OpenGL project: Write The hardware vendor extensions ( Extensions) to OpenAL, which also support the latest features of their audio devices. These are checked by an Architecture Review Board (ARB ), is first converted to standardized extensions and possibly later incorporated into the functions of OpenAL.

Supported Platforms

The listed platforms are fully supported by the OpenAL 1.0 implementation, more in the works.

Supported programming languages

OpenAL itself is programmed in C, there exist implementations / bindings for various programming languages ​​:

Applications that use OpenAL

Games

A series of games, both commercial and free, have already been developed using the OpenAL library.

Libraries / Engines

OpenAL has now found its way into many libraries and engines. A small selection shows the following list:

• Lightweight Java Game Library ( LWJGL )
• Unreal Engine
• Torque Game Engine
• Classical Moon Game Development Kit