Albert on 5/2/2010 at 21:20
OK, I'll make this real short. Thief 2 on my old computer can use EAX. However, Thief Gold doesn't. I look in the options menu and try turning hardware acceleration on, but it won't budge from off to on. Thus, I can't use EAX.
Is there a solution to this... Real simple like?
Sulphur on 5/2/2010 at 21:38
Yeah. Play the game in an echo chamber. :joke:
For the less simple solution (and this thread really ought to be in the Legacy Gaming Tech forum), you might want to tell us what OS you're using and what sound card you're running the games on.
Not that I can claim to help (I just use ALchemy if required on my X-Fi), but the people who can will need those details first.
Sulphur on 6/2/2010 at 07:25
You can either keep grumping or you can request for this thread to be moved to the proper forum. Your choice, buddy-o.
Albert on 6/2/2010 at 16:40
There! }:|
Now... Isn't there some patch I could use that simply modifies TG's sound options so, just like Thief 2, it can also detect the hardware and EAX capabilities of my sound chip?
baeuchlein on 6/2/2010 at 20:28
Quote Posted by Albert
Thief 2 works great with EAX, but Gold doesn't...
Thief 1 and 2 behave slightly different when you try to use EAX. It is quite possible that, for some odd reason, Thief 1 will refuse to work with EAX while Thief 2 doesn't. This may be caused by the sound card's drivers, the OS, the game, or even a combination of all this. It is even possible that there's nothing you can do about it in the end.
Okay, after properly discouraging you, I'll now pretend to actually be trying to help you.;)
At first, you should check whether Thief Gold allows you to switch on EAX, but then produces the same sound as before, or whether the game does not even allow you to switch EAX to "on" in the game menu.
I don't have Thief Gold installed at the moment, but if I remember it correctly, the game menus contain a sound sub-menu where you can select the number of sound channels and other sound-related things. If I want to have EAX, I have to set "Hardware Sound" (or was it "Hardware accelerated sound"?) to "On" first in this menu. Only after doing that, I may as well set EAX to "On" or "Off".
With older sound cards, it may not be possible to set EAX to "On", and sometimes even "Hardware Sound" cannot be switched on. If one of these things occur, it usually means that either the sound card does not have the features needed for "Hardware accelerated sound" or EAX, or the card's drivers don't tell Thief that the sound card can do this. In the first case, you could not do anything, while in the second case, you could try to download newer drivers from the sound card's manufacturer (Analog Devices, in your case, I believe) and hope that they work better. However, since Thief 2 does work with EAX on your system, it is very unlikely that your card does not support it, but there are different versions of EAX, so maybe Thief Gold requires something which Thief 2 doesn't.
A while ago, there was some discussion about a possible fix for EAX problems. Check out (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=117175) this thread for more. Basically, there was a new version of a file called
a3d.dll which would fix EAX problems for some people, but not for all of us. Perhaps you should try it as well. IIRC, placing this file in the game directory of Thief Gold should work (if it works at all).
If all this does not help you, then please tell us more about what exacly goes wrong. Does Thief Gold allow you to select "Hardware Sound" and "EAX"? And if this is the case, what did you expect to hear but didn't? EAX usually means there's echo in the sewers below Bafford's, for example, but there is the matter about positional sounds (with four speakers) as well. Both are somewhat different things, and occasionally, one of them works while the other does not.
Albert on 6/2/2010 at 20:58
OK, so I see that all my attempts (all 2 of them) came down to this:
A3D.dll works, though I see what Sulphur meant by it sounding weird.
Regardless of whether EAX is set to on or off, hardware accel. is pretty much going to sound like I'm at the bottom of a well in a quire room! :cheeky:
Has anyone ever tried creating a patch that adds EAX settings to all the TG and T1 maps? It'd be a given considering how godawful it sounds with EAX on in TG.
Quote:
Here is the deal : If you have an on-board audio drive using Sensaura as a 3D sound API (Audio3d.dll) you will not hear some things normally. Examples: Your footsteps will sound very very low, enemy's talking in the same room just a few feet from you will sound low and etc. The Audio3d.dll file is disguised as a3d.dll file. Analog Audio has many of chipsets which are used in mother boards, most of them use Sensaura's API to render 3D Audio.
Ah, this is what it sounds like, almost. Dunno if my sense of aural to mental translation is off, tho.
lost_soul on 7/2/2010 at 17:10
I have long been hoping for someone to make a software emulator for EAX, because a lot of new sound cards do not support it. It can't possibly be that hard for a modern CPU to do. I've got a module player going right now with echo/surround effects applied, and though it is mixing 30+ instruments simultaneously, it only uses 1% of a relatively modest CPU.
Albert on 8/2/2010 at 00:51
Well, OpenAL has its own EAX variant, EFX. I wonder how one could modify an installation of openAL to read sound commands from thief.
baeuchlein on 13/2/2010 at 17:52
Quote Posted by Albert
Has anyone ever tried creating a patch that adds EAX settings to all the TG and T1 maps? It'd be a given considering how godawful it sounds with EAX on in TG.
Are there really maps in TG with EAX
missing? Or is it rather a problem with
Thief Gold and EAX, meaning
Thief wants to use EAX, but sometimes does not succeed? In that case, the maps would be fine and the problem lurking elsewhere.
