Jump to content

glottis

Members
  • Posts

    92
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  1. The pilot can be turned on with a keypress - from memory I think it's RSHIFT and P
  2. It's actually going from DX9 to OpenAL - DX10 doesn't have much to do with it, as you can run DX9 in Vista alongside DX10 (not just backward compatibility - it's actually using DX9 dlls! - that's why you sometimes need to install the DX9 update in Vista before a game will work). And I've had pretty consistent results with Alchemy - once you find the right settings for your particular setup for a game, it works every time. EDIT - Not trying to sound snotty btw - just hope you guys can get it working because it is possible!
  3. Yeah in English it's used incorrectly a lot - not sure that many people know exactly what it means.
  4. I'd pay £40-50 max I think (in UK).
  5. Cool, glad you got it working. Just FYI, when you move the game from left to right in Alchemy, it just copies the dll that does all the work into the game's folder. So yeah, it should work straight away if you chose the right folder :)
  6. Seeing as you quoted me explaining the benefit, and then asked what the benefit was, I guess I should try making more sense :) If, as a game developer, you want to make use of your users' sound cards to do such things as 3D (or 'surround') sound, EAX effects, or hardware processing that would otherwise take up CPU time, you need to make use of an API - this is a common way that games and programs can talk to a soundcard, without knowing about the hardware. In the old days (up to about 2005/6 I suppose) the most common way to do this was to use DirectSound - this was the sound library provided as part of DirectX. When Vista came along, Microsoft dropped support for DirectSound, because OpenAL was much better, and was becoming much more popular. Unfortunately, this meant that any games that tried to use DirectSound would sound crap - because they couldn't use any special features of the sound card, or hardware acceleration. Creative Alchemy came along to fix this. It replaces the crippled DirectSound that Microsoft provided in vista, and reroutes all of the stuff the game tells it to do to an OpenAL library. How to make it work in Black Shark Just click on 'add game', write in the path of the DCS.exe, and then add the game. Leave the other settings on their defaults. Job done :)
  7. Everyone I've spoken to, and every review I've read says that the high-end Auzentech cards are superior to Creative's X-Fi. Apparently vista driver support is good too. I think I'll pick up their new Theatre one once it finally gets released.
  8. Yeah I probably would've paid the extra for colour too I guess, but it's definitely not a deal-breaker. Looking forward to nerdy train journeys :) Selling it on amazon is a pretty good idea too - in terms of delivery time, gift certificates etc.
  9. Er...wha? IE? Do real computer-using people seriously run IE?? [not trolling, just...wha???]
  10. I believe ED know about #2 as well. A lot of us thought it was a feature until they let us know it's unintentional.
  11. Here's the deal with it: Any game that was coded to use DirectSound will not have access to hardware-accelerated or 3D sound (including hardware effects like EAX) under Vista. Alchemy allows you to get round this by taking all the game's calls to DirectSound functionality, and turning them into something that Vista drivers can work with. Not exactly - most developers will aim to use OpenAL (which works properly in Vista) in their new games, but some are still releasing games that rely on DirectSound. This is usually the case with new games that are based on an old engine - for example Black Shark, X3: Terran Conflict, etc. Rewriting the sound engine for a game will usually be a pretty big undertaking, which is why this issue is rarely patched or fixed after release. It's usually not worth the development time, because as we've seen in this thread, the average PC user is fairly impartial to or naive about sound quality. For example, I've seen loads of people that get a 7.1 system and just bunch all the satellites up around the front of their monitor - obviously 3D sound is not a priority for these dudes! So if a developer is going to rewrite parts of their engine, they'll go for stuff that people will notice, like graphical sugar or frame-rate improvements.
  12. I have an XFi in Vista. The sound is better than on-board sound cards. Anyone that argues that there is no difference simply has worse headphones, speakers, or ears than the average audiophile. Also, I agree with the assertion that the XFi hardware is nice, but the drivers (particularly in Vista) are bad. Apparently the Azuntech cards solve this problem by using XFi chipsets with better drivers and some better DAC on the card. I haven't tried one yet, but I think I will soon. The other main advantage of Creative cards, specifically for Black Shark in Vista, is that you can use Alchemy to get decent multi-channel audio, and fix the sound problems that other (Realtek etc.) users just have to live with.
  13. From my investigations into this, it seems like you don't really need the SDK to get basic lights/MFD text because ED have already provided a dll and lua script that will let you customise it using in-game scripting. HOWEVER, the dll currently crashes the game in Vista for many people, and as such the majority of X52 users have removed the directoutput.dll So basically, we need to wait for ED to fix the directoutput.dll problem, at which point I'll have a dig around and make some LED/MFD control. Things like lighting up the toggle switches when that function is on would be really nice.
  14. I can't afford lunch since getting all my hardware for black shark.
×
×
  • Create New...