People who worked with me at EA knew I had a special place in my heart for audio. Whether it was internally developed, from a licensed engine or third-party middleware, audio generated way more bugs than I would hope. It became something of a running joke where people would come to me for a crash they were trying to figure out and my immediate answer would be “Probably audio.”

All this to say! I’ve been spending a few hours trying to setup the audio bits of my engine. As I’ve already invested a little bit of time not getting too locked into using iOS specific features, I decided to try my hand at using OpenAL for my audio needs. Unfortunately Android and some other very distant porting goals don’t actually support it. Instead, they seem to be going with OpenSL, which seems to have been created with the rationale that mobile devices couldn’t support OpenAL. Except that you know, iOS already supports it. Boo.

Luckily it was pretty easy to get up and running with OpenAL. Sounds are loading and playing on all platforms! 3D positional audio seems like… substantial overkill for what I have in mind, but it’s nice it’s there in case I ever want to use it.