OpenAL Soft for better positional audio
I think that positional audio in Xonotic is lacking quite a bit which is surprising given the competitive nature of the game. I believe it's using SDLmixer for audio which is convenient to use but not really good at 3d audio.
So I'd like to propose to use OpenAL Soft for audio instead. It's FOSS (LGPLv2), used in many other projects, available on many platforms (OS and CPU architectures) and has top notch positional audio and some other great features.
Benefits of using OpenAL Soft:
- great positional audio
- HRTF for headphone users, which almost allows to pinpoint sound sources to the pixel they originate from (demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtFatWeEvGY )
- support for surround sound systems (5.1, 7.1)
- EFX for reverb if desired
- Automatic calculation of the Doppler effect (optional)
- highly optimized algorithms (making use of SSE, NEON and perhaps other SIMD instruction sets)
project page: http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html