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Gamer Guides & Tips > A3D Sound For Half-Life
A3D Sound For
Half-Life
What is A3D Sound?
A3D is a new sound chip technology produced by Aureal Semiconductor. It was
introduced in 1997 and it's quickly becoming another technological trend in the
game industry. It has been said that A3D grants to audio what 3Dfx does to
video. That's a bold statement. Does it live up to the hype?
First of all, many other developers have joined the ranks of A3D developers
such as Activision, LucasArts, Electronic Arts and GT Interactive. Those aren't
the only ones, over 60 first tier developers are working on over 100 new titles
for release in 1998. This is an impressive list. So what does A3D do that has
caused all these developers to jump on the A3D bandwagon in less then a year?
The answer lies in its NASA-based technology.
As mentioned, A3D is a new sound chip. It works surprisingly well with almost
any type of playback device such as headphones, stereo speakers, or a
multi-speaker array. This is due to the fact that it relies totally on its
accelerated hardware. This means that the A3D chip allows the game to hand the
magnificent task of playing a sound to the chip and then return to concentrate
on blowing up the player.
A3D is designed to function or to reproduce sound the way we would normally
hear it, the way our ears would hear it. For example: If you were playing a
space simulation game and your ship was in the thick of battle, you would hear
the laser fire and explosions that are close by you. Perhaps your wingman, as
they often do when I play, meets a sudden and unexpected end. The explosion
from that ship would be heard coming from his direction. Now this is nothing
new for 3D sound but say we add another ship, a very large ship that is parked
off your starboard side and say, your wingman was just off your port position.
The sound from your exploding wingman would travel until it struck the large
ship and bounce or reverberate back at you. This is one of the many things that
A3D does to improve the quality of sound.
So how does A3D do this?
Well, just like in a 3D environment where you need a view point and a
surrounding environment to look at, A3D requires a listener and a sound source.
It uses Aureal's Wavetracing™ technology, which is a similar idea behind
ray-casting or ray- tracing, to project sound waves off objects within the
environment. This allows the sound to be rendered with reflections,
reverberations and occlusions and it does this in real-time.
OK, my card supports A3D now where do I get the latest
drivers?
Simple the latest version of the A3D sound drivers is 3.12 and can be
downloaded by clicking on the link below.
Now I have the latest drivers is there any other
tweaks I can do?
Yes, you can tweak the sound settings in Half-Life by typing in the console
commands and setting different values for settings to suit your gaming needs. A
better way of doing this for Half-Life is to create a 'cfg' (config) file to
enable your sound setting when loading.
Example of a A3D Sound .cfg file for
Half-Life
Simply copy and paste the following load of Half-Life sound settings into a
blank notepad document and save it as 's_a3d.cfg'. Then place the file
into your Half-Life 'Valve' directory. Remember to activate it by placing
'exec s_a3d.cfg' into your autoexec.cfg file located in your valve
folder of Half-Life or whatever Half-Life gaming mod you maybe playing; That's
all! now when you load up a game in Half-Life it will auto load your A3D sound
setting if you have followed the above instructions correctly.
NOTE: The following settings will only work correctly for A3D supported
sound cards not EAX only cards.
echo Executing 's_a3d.cfg'...
developer 1
ambient_level 0.1
ambient_fade 100
bgmvolume 0
hisound 1
loadas8bit 0
room_off 0
suitvolume 0.5
volume 0.9
s_snd_mixahead 0.1
s_2dvolume 0.88
s_bloat 2
s_distance 1000
s_doppler 0.0
s_geometry 0
s_occlude 0
s_occfactor 0.25
s_leafnum 0
s_max_distance 1200
s_min_distance 8
s_numpolys 200
s_reverb 1
s_refdelay 4
s_reflect 1
s_refgain 0.42
s_rolloff 1.0
s_verbwet 0.25
s_a3d 1
s_eax 0
echo A3D settings complete
developer 0
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Do you have a A3D.cfg already made up?
Yes we do and you can download it from the link below and place the file into
your Valve directory under Half-Life. Rember you will still need to activate it
in Half-Life by placing 'exec s_a3d.cfg' in your valve autoexec.cfg file or by
typing 'exec s_a3d.cfg' into your Half-Life console everytime you play
Half-Life.
Related Links
A3D Sound in Half-Life under Windows XP
EAX Sound in Half-Life under Windows XP
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