Effects Testing

First, I set up an old Sound Blaster 16 card. Then, I ran around a few environments, from the claustrophobic hazard course to the bright outdoors of the C2 and C3 levels. What did I notice? For one, Half Life does a DAMN GOOD job of rendering reverb effects through its own custom sound engine. Fighting in sewage pipes, huge halls, and office corridors all sounded very convincing, and at least for this game, if you're not getting either of these cards, you're not missing too much.

I then swapped out the SB16 with my trusty SB Live. A few clicks later, and EAX was enabled. What did I notice? First of all, when I loaded Half Life with the -dev command, the EAX presets popped onscreen as I moved through the environment, undoubtedly debug code to verify its activity. Audibly, the sound effects were more subtle, and in my opinion much more realistic than without EAX. There are still a few instances where the customized software renderer had more interesting effect, for example the "twangy" echo from inside a long steel pipe, but for most other sounds, EAX provided a much cleaner experience. Note also that Half-Life is an exceptional title, with meticulous detail applied to every aspect of the game. The Valve programmers told me specifically how easy it was to add in EAX support, and for game developers without the time to create their own sound engine, EAX provides a simple, painless solution to adding environmental sounds to games.

EAX in Half Life

Onto the MX300 system: a simple mouse click and A3D 2.0 was activated. Initially, I didn't think Half Life supported 3D positional sound. In reality, it did, but was definitely more subtle than Aureal's A3D Room demo. It definitely took a little effort to notice, but what did make a difference was Vortex 2's reflection/occlusion code. Switching between A3D on and off, the first thing I noticed were that gunshot sounds from my character were very muted with A3D enabled. [Editor's note: Aureal has just released an updated A3D 2.01 driver which should address the technical issues in Half Life. They can be found at Aureal.

Respawn/enemy sounds were fine, but if I fired a weapon, I didn't get the benefit of hearing the game's excellent sound effects at full volume. Bummer. Maybe gunshots were occluding through the barrel of the gun or the HEV suit? Nah. What I did look out for was a noticeable difference in realism as I ran and slunk through single and multiplayer games. What I found was in certain situations, wavetracing did make the game more realistic, but the effect is very subtle, and sometimes even puts you at a disadvantage. In one instance, I was in a narrow corridor overlooking a room. I heard faint gunfire, only to see my opponent (Thresh no less) appear a second later, guns blazing right at my hiding spot. As he cleared the concrete wall and burst into view, the volume of his gunfire exploded voluminously, scaring the hell out of me.

Despite any issues I might have, I do feel that geometry-affected sounds can be a great benefit to games as well, if implemented correctly. If sounds could be filtered, yet still audible at the same distance a non-filtered sound could be heard at, the additional realism and sound cues can add a new element to deathmatch. A3D 2.0 is already positioned to take full advantage of that, and with EAX 2.0, Creative evidently sees the possible benefits as well.