PLEASE NOTE: This software is not maintained
anymore!
Please see Apple's implementation at openal.org, which is also
shipping as a default framework in MacOS X Tiger.
I make occasional fixes
and patches to this codebase as I need them, but the way forward is Apple's
implementation. My version is heavily dependent on Altivec, so it'll definitely
be dead once the Intel Macs arrive in force. You should generally consider
this page to be here for historical reasons only at this point.
If you want to continue, don't say you haven't been warned.
What is this?
- This is a MacOS X implementation of OpenAL. It's highly optimized, has a few
useful extensions, and can be shipped as a tiny shared library, which makes it
nice for downloadable games. It does not support surround sound, but the
2-speaker output is blazingly fast, thanks to lots of hand-tuned Altivec
code. The implementation has scalar fallbacks, and thus will work on
non-Altivec chips like the G3, too.
This is not the CoreAudio version mentioned at www.openal.org...
- ...the implementation here is a different codebase...and it's better
and worse in various ways.
Programs known to use this implementation of OpenAL:
License:
Getting source from the Mercurial
repository:
hg clone http://hg.icculus.org/icculus/al_osx/
Building it:
- Install XCode, if you haven't.
- Open a terminal.
- cd /where/i/checkedout/al_osx/osx
- edit "Makefile", see if you want to change anything (the defaults are usually fine, though).
- run "make"
- You are left with a file, "openal.dylib", which you can drop into your application.
Pertinent links:
--ryan.