The Brain on 5/1/2008 at 14:11

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Huh? If you place that dll in your game folder, it will be used. No magic tricks are needed.

Destructor on 29/1/2008 at 10:34

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HiYa,

I've been trying everything to get audio working in SS2, but running a search for:

"a3d.dll a3dx5"

reveals only a russian website, no working links. Is this file still available?

Likewise with the EAX installer

baeuchlein on 4/2/2008 at 16:39

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I have found some sound problems with "3D sound" (more than stereo, e.g. a 4.0 or 5.1 speaker setup) a.k.a. "positional sounds" and Thief 2 in the past, so I decided to give this a3d.dll thing a try. The whole matter turned out to be very complicated, but here are my results. In case any of you doesn't want to read through all this, I'll tell you one thing right away: The a3d.dll did not change anything for me. Your mileage may vary, however.


Software:

I used Windows 98 Second Edition, Thief 2 (german) patched to version 1.18 and Thief 1 (german, "Director's Cut" - that's Thief Gold for most other people), and an unknown version of System Shock 2. I downloaded a3d.dll (version 80.0.0.3) from (http://www.dll-files.com/search.php?s=dll).


Hardware:

I used a Sound Blaster 4.1 Digital (also sold as ES1371 or as SB PCI 128; uses a version of the CT5880 chip) and a Realtek ALC650 (the onboard sound of my mainboard). The Realtek drivers were version A3.91; for the SB I used two different driver versions, but there were no real differences, and no driver versions mentioned anyway.


With the SB 4.1, there were no noticeable changes with the new a3d.dll, even when I deleted Windows' a3d.dll from the \WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory to ensure that the newer one would be used. The SB always produced very faint and muffled sounds from the rear speakers, in contrast to a reasonably loud output from the front speakers. Whether this is a problem with the card or with the drivers I don't know, but I can't solve it as there are no volume controls for the rear and front speakers, just one volume control for all of them.

Furthermore, if Garrett jumps forward in Thief 2, the sound of his feet hitting the ground again is much fainter than if he jumps backward. This sometimes happened with other sound cards as well, so it might be somehow related to Windows or even the game.

Several sounds are muffled even when using stereo speakers only and turning on hardware sound acceleration in Thief 1/2 or System Shock 2. The environmental sound effects, a feature of EAX, sound very good, but unfortunately they're sometimes played from the wrong speaker even when I'm only using a stereo speaker setup.

If I select "Digital output" for the SB 4.1 Digital instead of "Analog output", the positional sounds are unusable: The front left sounds correctly come from the front left speaker; sounds from front right disappear; sounds from rear right can be heard in the front right speaker, and so on.

Not even one of all these problems vanishes when using the downloaded a3d.dll; thus, the only way for me to get reasonable sounds with this sound card is to disable hardware accelerated sound completely. No positional sounds and no EAX environmental effects, period.


The Realtek ALC650 produces better positional sounds than the SB, but its drivers appear to be poorly written. Some of the chip's features "disappear" from time to time (according to some Control Panel program for the chip) and reappear once I reboot the machine. There are more problems and crashes with these drivers (not only with games) compared to when I use the SB card.

The positional sounds in Thief 2 are O.K. (although considerably muffled) with the Realtek chip, the EAX effects for different sound environments (e.g., echoes in the cellar when playing the first mission where one has to reunite Basso and Jenivere) are less convincing than those of the SB 4.1.

With Thief 1 and System Shock 2, however, there are problems whenever I turn on hardware support for sounds from within the game. Running sounds very faint in Thief 1; in System Shock 2, I don't hear any sound at all when running over a metal grate - usually, this produces a loud sound effect. None of these problems appear in Thief 2.

Using the downloaded a3d.dll did not change anything, again.


There's much more to say about hardware support for sounds and the EAX environmental effects. For example, I can only select EAX effects in the Dark Engine games if I move a slider to the far right in the Multimedia section in Control Panel. However, this would lead us completely away from a3d.dll, so I'll skip that. Just keep in mind that there's yet another source of problems related to all this sound stuff we're talking about.


There is something else I noticed. If no a3d.dll is available in either the game's directory or Windows', Thief 1 and System Shock 2 are unable to turn on hardware accelerated sound. You can't switch it on in the Audio sub-menu; if you trick this option into "on" when there's no a3d.dll available, Shock 2 does not produce sound at all. Thief 2, however, does not depend on the a3d.dll file: The game still produces positional sounds and EAX environmental effects even if the DLL is nowhere to be found. Whether Thief 2 uses a newer version of a3d.dll at all I cannot say.


For me, all of this turned out to be much ado about nothing. This is not a negative comment to DaNtAn's post which started the thread, but you can regard it as a warning: Whatever problems you have with Dark Engine games and sound, don't waste too much time on that. Several programmers and hardware builders apparently didn't do their homework, so only non-hardware sounds are a sure bet. If a3d.dll does the trick for you, be happy and enjoy it. If not, don't waste your time with this sound issue.

Guest Thief Garrett on 14/2/2008 at 12:03

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Ok, firstly I would like to say thanks to "DaNtAn" for getting the sound to work perfectly for me (I can now hear footsteps, myself jumping/landing, voice acting, doors opening etc.)

But.....the game freezes for me now!! (and not in the same area/time either)
Sometimes, it happens directly when I move at the start of the first mission, other times I would get as far as a sewer, jump down and then it freezes, another time it froze when I got to the well area.

Anyone know how to fix this problem? I'm very close to giving up at this stage (first the videos didn't work, I fixed that. Then I got the blank screen, I fixed that problem eventually also. Then as you know, the sound wasn't working, and now, it freezes! I've never came across a more non XP-friendly game than this!)

KoHaN69 on 4/7/2008 at 20:49

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This fix did nort wrok for me, I'm still having the issue in thief gold :erg: