Doom 3 Now Supports Surround Sound

nukem996 writes "DOOM 3 v1.1.1286 for Linux has just been released. ALSA has finally been implemented so Linux gamers can finally play Doom 3 with surround sound! Along with surround sound support this release fixes a number of bugs. You can read Timo's release notes here. As usual the release is up on the idsoftware ftp server and there is a torrent."

Comments

Re:if you want more games under linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Petitions are worthless. Unless the makers are Linux enthusiasts like Carmack, the only thing that matters is a demonstrated willingness to spend money. Buy some Linux games and more will follow.

Re:if you want more games under linux

[mahdi13]

I think we'll see a Linux port of Half-Life long before World of Warcraft...

Surround sound already supported?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doom 3 already supports surround sound doesn't it? Or is this one of those "now also in Linux" things? The title could be made a little more clear I think.

You're blaming the wrong people

[Mornelithe]

Why didn't Doom 3 for Linux ship with this? Why does about every game I have bought in the past two years on Windows support surround sound just fine?

Allow me to rewrite your question from an opposite perspective:

Why did id choose to write its sound code using an API that hasn't been actively developed by the community in years, and from which everyone is moving away? Why didn't they write code that works with what people are actually using?

People are working on sound for Linux. It's called ALSA. It's what pretty much everyone using a 2.6 kernel will be using. It does desktop audio. It does professional audio. [1] It emulates OSS for legacy compatibility, but if you want to actually take advantage of its features, you need to actually use it.

So, yes, why didn't Doom 3 on Linux ship with this? Because id didn't put in the extra effort, and because they wanted to support the old API for some reason. This isn't the fault of 'the community.' The API is already out there. ALSA didn't just suddenly gain support for surround sound. It's had it. The fact here is that id is just now including support for the current Linux sound architecture.

Would you blame Microsoft if Halflife 2 only used features from DirectX 6 at first, and then in a later patch they updated it to use DirectX 9?

[1] ALSA doesn't work too well on some cards unfortunately. The reason for this is that some companies refuse to release specifications in order for drivers to be written. This means that the developers (only a few people) have to reverse engineer the cards to write drivers. This is hardly the fault of 'the community' either, and really, they've done a remarkable job on some of them, considering what they've had to work with.