A3D's future

The next wave(trace)

Aureal was a little tight-lipped about what was coming after A3D 2.0, understandable as they are still trying to push that technology out to game developers. All that could be said for sure was that the next evolutionary steps would involve incremental improvements and add-ons. In essence, it will take the same geometry being fed in by the graphics engine to A3D 2.0, and do more with that information, modeling more accurate sounds and adding new effects (thus making it more or less forwards-compatible).

Not satisfied with such a blanket answer, I began asking questions and posing specific examples, which luckily turned out to be not far from truth! One of the areas in A3D 2.0 that can use work are late order reflections and reverberations, which would take a large leap in terms of processing power to accurately incorporate into the wavetracing model.

I asked it if were possible to take the geometry information from the first through nth order reflections modeled by wavetracing, and use that information to calculate a suitable late-order reverberation. This would allow for dynamic, modeled reverberations which would be pseudo-accurate to the in-game geometry without having to be static presets or individually rendered cacophonous arrays of reflections.

Quake III Arena and A3D

Contrary to widespread belief, Quake III Arena currently has no plans to support 3D audio. Aureal claims that John Carmack has not been a very big fan of cutting-edge audio for various reasons. For a small, tightly-scheduled company like id, it does make some sense - focus on the bare necessities, and anything extra can be added 1) if and when there is free time, and 2) if it can be done with enough control to never have to depend on an outside source for anything.

Aureal is making some strides however, and they have recently ported their tools and APIs over to Windows NT, id Software's current development platform. It may be safe to say that "if id chooses to support anything, it'll be A3D," but Aureal admits that most likely, they may find out about it when the rest of us do - namely, when the game ships.