3DsoundSurge FAQ: Half Life Issues


	WARNING! Changing these settings could seriously affect your listening experience of these games. Only experienced users should change these values; please refer to the defaults listed for each variable to return the game to its original settings.

Please support 3DsoundSurge by visiting our sponsors

FAQ: Half-Life's A3D Issues

The following is from a news group posting by Aureal's David Gasior

We are still waiting on code from Valve so we can look into helping them fix problems with the original Monster Sound cards.
Still waiting on code so we can look at the weapon sounds and see if there is anything we can do to make them brighter.
We have found, based on demos that people have sent us, that our original variables were not set to account for many of these levels and weapons. We did most of our testing with Half-Life: Day One, which does not have many of the levels and weapons that the retail version does, so we didn't see (or hear) what people were reporting until we played the retail and got really far into the game.

These console variable changes have been tested in many of the later levels, along with most of the really kick-ass weapons. They should be fine for making sure that your weapon sounds don't get drowned out by the other noises around you. We have tested them on our Vortex 1 and Vortex 2 boards and they seem to work real nicely.
- s_distance 18
- s_2dvolume 0.88
- s_verbwet 0.15
- s_min_distance 8
- s_refgain 0.34
Framerate hit when using A3D 2.0 is still a little high for most people, and we are work at reducing that as much as we can. One of the problems with Half-Life and the demos we've gotten seems to be that we can run a demo once, get a really low number for the framerate, then run it again and it and watch it double. Some sort of caching of textures maybe?I notice that the longer the demo, the better the framerate gets.

Regardless, if you are suffering a framerate hit that is unacceptable to you, use the geometry console variable to turn off geometry processing (what sucks up the host time). This can be done as follows:

s_geometry 0

You will still retain A3D positional audio, but on a Vortex 2 card, your framerate should be +/- 2 fps of what DirectSound offers. Hopefully, we will a new A3D driver release shortly that will start to bring the framerates back up, even with geom processing.

If you have any questions or comments on this, please feel free to email David Gasior at dgasior@a3d.com